Saving Children Through Health Education
More than 300,000 children under five die in Ethiopia every year, 70 per cent of them from diarrhoea, malaria, pneumonia, measles and malnutrition. Bruktawit Tigabu will produce new episodes of Tsehai Loves Learning to teach preschool children and their parents basic health education. The programme uses songs, stories and simple graphics to make health concepts easy to grasp. The episodes will be shown to children and parents on television, mainly in Addis Ababa, and in rural areas, where few families have television, at cinemas and community health centres.
A radio version is being developed for nationwide broadcast to a potential audience of more than 40 million children. An impact study will assess behavioural changes following transmission of the episodes to measure any decrease in the child mortality rate. Some programmes will also be dubbed into Tigrinya (another language spoken in Ethiopia) and Sudanese Arabic.
children under five die in Ethiopia every year
percentage of Ethiopian preschooler deaths caused by diarrhoea, malaria, pneumonia, measles and malnutrition
preschoolers reached by Bruktawit's Tsehai Loves Learning