Soul City Institute for Health & Development Communication

Globally, communication plays an integral role in public health strategies, from infectious diseases to diseases related to lifestyles. The evolution of the field of social and behaviour change communication (SBCC), combined with the need for evidence based practice and multi-level interventions to promote health, and human resource gaps in sub-Saharan Africa have led to the imperative to standardise and formalise the field. Moreover, current practitioners come from different disciplinary backgrounds underlining the need to define common core skills and competencies. This paper describes the partnership between the Wits School of Public Health and the Soul City Institute for Health and Development Communication and how the partners responded to this need. It highlights the factors influencing sustainable institutional capacity to provide quality assured, accredited training. We describe an unexpected positive response from a number of practitioner organisations that have chosen to send multiple staff members for training, specifically to build a critical mass within their organisations. Finally, we note the interest from (mostly) southern-based academic institutions in setting up similar programmes and postulate that south–south collaborations can contribute to building sustainable context specific and evidence-informed SBCC programmes in the global south.

The authors are employees of the Soul City Institute of Health and Development Communication in South Africa except for Dr. Arvind Singhal of Ohio University. Singhal served on the research advisory committee to Soul City IV, the subject of the present chapter.