Focusing on leadership development; building social capital; and cross-collaboration and learning between stakeholders, local partners, and government entities, Breakthrough ACTION employed efforts to bolster existing activities and develop novel approaches for other health and human service delivery partners to fold into their programming. Working at a systems level, the project helped transform community engagement and service delivery initiatives through innovative applications of social and behavior change approaches. Both countries embraced these diverse social and behavior change activities, even incorporating the strategies into national five-year plans for the first time. As a result, local ministries of health have a broader capacity to design, implement, and assess activities in the future to sustain improvements to health. Breakthrough ACTION also developed and launched numerous public health focused media campaigns, including the Hèrè and Garkuwar Al’Umma integrated health radio and TV campaigns that reached millions.
The Empathways cards provide a practical, semi-structured way to establish empathy and respect between adults and young people, and to use this empathy to facilitate difficult conversations about sexual and reproductive health topics.
