Gathering in person to advance informed and engaged societies

After nearly 28 years, The Communication Initiative (The CI) Global is entering a new chapter. 

Following a period of transition, the global website has been transferred to the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in South Africa, where it will be administered by the Social and Behaviour Change Communication Division. Wits' commitment to social change and justice makes it a trusted steward for The CI's legacy and future. 

On the transfer, co-founder Victoria Martin expressed her pleasure to see this work continue under Wits' leadership, knowing that co-founder Warren Feek (1953–2024) would have felt deep pride in The CI Global's Africa-led direction. 

As Wits, we honour the team and partners who sustained The CI for decades and look forward building from that strong base. This includes co-founders Warren Feek (1953-2024) and Victoria Martin as well as La Iniciativa de Comunicación (CILA), which continues independently at lainiciativadecomunicacion.com with links to The CI Global site. We are also eager to forge new partnerships and entertain new ideas as we consider how best to contribute to social and behaviour change in our rapidly evolving environment.

If you are joining the International Social and Behaviour Change Communication (SBCC) Summit in Panama, please join Wits and CILA on Monday, 22 June, to share your thoughts and suggestion for the relaunch of the Communication Initiative. We will be in Pacifica 5 from 12-1:25 for the Refuel, Reflect, and Renew Lunch Series: The Communication Initiative: celebrating a driving force for Communication for Social Change and the way forward. We will reflect on the legacy of Warren Feek and family in creating the Communication Initiative, consider the contributions of CI over the years and then turn our attention towards the future in this dynamic session. 

If you are unable to join us in Panama, we still want to hear from you. Please contribute your thoughts by following this link: https://redcap.link/CommunicationInitiative2026 or reaching out to ci_surveys@commint.com

You can also follow the QR Code:

 https://redcap.link/CommunicationInitiative2026

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Guilkey, D. K., & Hutchinson, P. L. (2011). Overcoming methodological challenges in evaluating health communication campaigns: Evidence from rural Bangladesh

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Guilkey, D. K., & Hutchinson, P. L. (2011). Overcoming methodological challenges in evaluating health communication campaigns: Evidence from rural Bangladesh. Studies in Family Planning, 42(2), 93-106.

Abstract

In this study, we examine the effectiveness of the Smiling Sun multimedia health communication campaign in encouraging women to use family health services in rural Bangladesh. We control for endogenous program placement and address the potential endogeneity of self-reported campaign exposure in health-behavior equations by estimating a set of exposure, contraceptive-use, and antenatal-care equations by full information maximum likelihood (FIML). We find that evaluation methods that do not take into account these nonrandom characteristics of communication and program exposure may produce underestimates of program benefits. Relative to the exposure effect of 3.7 percentage points in the simple model of contraceptive use, the exposure effect in the FIML model is a larger 5.5 percentage points, corresponding to as many as 40,000 additional contraceptive users. We conclude that evaluations of health communication campaigns would benefit from methods such as estimation by FIML that address nonrandom exposure and program targeting.