Communication as a Right: Systems, Disinformation & Equitable Access

In Santa Cruz County, people often assume that poor maternal outcomes stem from individual behaviors or isolated clinical failures. But when we spent months in deep empathy interviews with birthing people, OB/GYNs, doulas, promotoras, nurses, hospital leaders, and Mixteco-speaking families, a very different truth emerged: the greatest barrier to equitable, joyful birth was the system itself.
This story follows a composite mother, rooted in more than 30 lived-experience interviews, as she moves across two counties, two hospital systems, three clinics, and multiple languages simply to have a safe delivery. Her journey threads together the report's nine themes: geographic inequity, racialized care, workforce shortages, mistrust, stigma, postpartum abandonment, hospital instability, and the quiet power of community networks that step in when systems falter.
What flips the script is not the problem, but the response. Families, doulas, CHWs, and frontline providers designed bold, structural solutions now moving toward prototyping:
• A countywide Doula & CHW Equity Network integrated into hospital workflows
• A multilingual navigation and transfer system built with Indigenous and Spanish-speaking families
• Anti-racism accountability dashboards tied to lived experience, not institutional reporting
• A 90-day postpartum bundle co-designed with families experiencing depression, stigma, and housing instability
• A birth equity coalition building contingency plans to keep South County's only labor-and-delivery unit from closure
The story shows how SBCC can move beyond messaging into structural redesign-where communication, trust, and community power reshape the very conditions of birth.

"The mosquito will make me gay! " In late 2023, this viral claim swept across Indonesian social media, derailing one of the country's most promising public health efforts: the Wolbachia mosquito initiative. Originally proven in Yogyakarta to reduce dengue cases by 77%, the intervention was being scaled nationally to five cities, with Bali preparing for launch. But misinformation outpaced data, using emotionally charged narratives to exploit religious sensitivities and vaccine-related distrust.
False claims, linking Wolbachia to global conspiracies, vaccine fears, or even LGBT "agendas", spread rapidly on platforms like TikTok, where short, dramatic content often reaches middle- to low-income audiences more effectively than scientific reasoning. While Bali's local communities supported the intervention, online rejection was fueled by distant voices with digital and political power, many centered in Jakarta.
The Ministry of Health and the Center for Tropical Medicine at Universitas Gadjah Mada (CTM UGM) launched a rapid-response communication strategy: media monitoring, social listening, and targeted messaging. Still, years of research struggled to compete with three-second videos engineered for outrage.
It raises urgent questions about communication equity: Who gets to shape public truth when scientific voices are buried under sensationalism? How can we expect science to earn trust when the platforms, speed, and emotional pull of misinformation far exceed its reach? And if political interests align against public health, does evidence still stand a chance? In the end, science must step beyond paywalls, meet people in their feeds, collaborate with digital voices, and speak early before misinformation fills the silence.

Access to reliable health and social information is vital for improving outcomes, yet barriers such as low literacy, remoteness, and stigma often limit reach. To address these challenges, UNICEF, the Ghana Health Service, and Viamo developed Agoo, an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) platform providing free information in six widely spoken languages. Initially launched in 2015 during the Ebola outbreak, Agoo has since expanded to cover maternal and child health, WASH, nutrition, gender-based violence, STI/HIV, disability inclusion, employability, and COVID-19 and is now equipt with Viamo's voice AI capabilities.
By 2025, the platform had recorded more than 10 million engagements from over 530,000 unique users between the ages of 15-19, positioning it as one of the largest inclusive health and social information platforms in Ghana. Agoo demonstrates how mobile-first, voice-based solutions can extend access to reliable, stigma-free information among marginalized populations.
Key lessons include the importance of iterative content design, multilingual accessibility, and strong government partnerships to ensure sustainability. Looking ahead, UNICEF and Viamo plan to integrate offline AI-driven advisory services for youth and expand referral pathways to link users directly with essential services. This case contributes new insights on how IVR can scale evidence-based, inclusive Social and Behavior Change (SBC) communication, strengthen system resilience, and adapt rapidly to emerging health and social challenges.

Myanmar faces a complex humanitarian crisis driven by conflict, displacement, economic instability, and natural disasters. Misinformation, poor feeding practices, myths and taboos around certain foods were among the main drivers of malnutrition in the country and although some progresses were made in previous years, compounded effects of conflicts, instability, economic hardships and natural disasters have pushed SBC initiatives to a state of near collapse with limited or no access to reliable information where in-person delivery of SBC interventions are becoming increasingly challenging, especially in emergency and protracted settings. Integrated with food assistance, asset creation and livelihood generation, WFP has developed an integrated Social and Behavior Change (SBC) strategy tailored targeted to emergency and protracted settings to prevent malnutrition and improve nutrition outcomes. Drawing on evidence of how mobile phones and internet have become vital tools of resilience in the country, the strategy combines community-led engagement with digital innovation, designed to empower community volunteers to lead bottom-up behavior change efforts, especially in times of crisis. This narrative strategy is structured in three phases, interpersonal communication and community mobilization for months, followed by dissemination of a mobile application to support group learning, individual exploration and engagements, and continues with a focus on sustainability through regular content updates. The digital platform is designed to function both online and offline, ensuring inclusivity and adaptability. It could offer valuable insights into how digital tools and human interaction can be combined to drive lasting behavior change, informing future SBC programming in humanitarian contexts.