Title: Audience segmentation
Course: Health Education, Advocacy and Community Mobilisation Part 1 - Ethiopia (Full)

Audience segmentation

Health education should be audience-specific and designed for the particular target group of people you are hoping to reach. As a Health Extension Practitioner you should select your audience for each of your specific health education activities. For example if you need to create awareness on prevention of mother to child HIV/AIDS transmission (PMTCT) your specific audience should be as many as possible of the pregnant mothers in your kebele. If you want to create awareness on the role of males in family planning services your target audience could be married males and male adolescents. Such segmentation of your audience makes your health education more effective.

Routine vaccination is among the activities you will be expected to implement at your community level (Figure 1.7). Suppose you want to conduct awareness creation on the advantages of childhood vaccination in your area. Who do you think should be your target audience for a health education session on childhood vaccination?

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Pregnant women, parents and carers would be the target audience for the session. Remember the word 'target'. It means being very specific.

Figure 1.7 A successful immunization campaign, for example, relies on effective health education activities. (Photo: AMREF/Demissew Bezuwork)