person and children with different ability through such program.
7. Designing Effective Environment Management Public Awareness
Communication to Fight Poverty in Developing Countries
By Wilson Okaka, Email: [email protected]
The present innovative approaches to assessing and the major challenges
of designing and delivering effective public communications campaigns are
important for poverty reduction. It uses public awareness of the national
wetlands and environment management policy in Uganda. It assesses the
influence of the national wetlands policy awareness strategy on the target
socio-economic audiences. It considers clusters of communities in the urban
and rural Uganda.The problem was based on the assumptions that the
campaigns strategies for the national wetlands policy awareness in
Bangladesh have been unsuccessful because they did not focus on the
audience participation and their demographic (socio-economic)
background. A multi-media strategy should be adopted with a mix of
electronic, print, and popular media for maximum audience exposure and
access to the messages. There is no gender barrier to information uptake.
Low income and education levels were barriers to community access to
wetlands and environment policy information. The campaigns should
emphasize the use of popular and interpersonal communications media. The
government, researchers and research institutions, research networks, civil
society organisations (NGOs), the citizens’ committees, and donors are
aware of this fact. Already, less effective multiple communications strategies
for sustainable development have been tried. The specific objectives of the
strategy were to: identify the types of media communications used in the
public campaigns; assess the quality of the media messages received by the
intended audiences; establish the extent of audience exposure to the media
messages; investigate the audiences’ attitudes and behaviour change by the
campaigns; investigate audience participation in the public awareness
campaigns; determine the impacts of the messages in raising awareness
among the audiences. The theoretical framework of the research is the use
of the diffusion of innovations theory. The focus of diffusion of innovations
theory is creating awareness through information dissemination among the
target audiences. Diffusion model identifies the problem as lack of
information and the goal (outcome) is behaviour change. The solution to
lack of information is information transfer to spur the required knowledge,
attitude, and practice. The types of interventions include social marketing,
entertainment, and education. The mass media is more influential in
spreading awareness about adopting new possibilities and practices of
innovations. Diffusion of innovations theory studies how, why, and at what
rate new ideas spread through cultures. The relevance of the theory is to
44 4th National Knowledge Convention