Title: The purpose of planning in health education
Course: Health Education, Advocacy and Community Mobilisation Part 2 - Ethiopia (Full)

The purpose of planning in health education

There are several benefits to planning your activities. Firstly, planning enables you to match your resources to the problem you intend to solve (Figure 12.2). Secondly, planning helps you to use resources more efficiently so you can ensure the best use of scarce resources. Thirdly, it can help avoid duplication of activities. For example, you wouldn't offer health education to households on the same topic at every visit. Fourthly, planning helps you prioritise needs and activities. This is useful because your community may have a lot of problems, but not the resources or the capacity to solve all these problems at the same time. Finally, planning enables you to think about how to develop the best methods with which to solve a problem.

Figure 12.2 Every village in Ethiopia is different. Planning is required so the health messages are tailored to the specific conditions. (Photo: UNICEF Ethiopia/Indrias Getachew)

Haimonot is a Health Extension Practitioner. She is working at a health post near your village. Haimonot is doing health education activities — but not planning them. How would you convince her that planning health education activities would be helpful? What points would you want to talk about? Use the paragraph above to help you plan what you want to say.

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To convince Haimonot to plan her own health education activities, you could explain the purpose of planning to her. You could explain that:

- Planning will make it easier for her to identify what she needs to do, and be more efficient in her work.
- Planning would help her to prioritise the health problems in her community that need intervention.
- Planning would help her choose the problems that are most important, and to match resources with the problems she intends to address. This would enable her to use her scarce resources more efficiently, and avoid unnecessary activities.