Building Health Literacy Through Visual Storytelling
According to WHO, health promotion is about enabling people to increase control over their own health and quality of life. It doesn’t merely focus on treatment or curing disease, but addresses the root causes of ill-health through social and environmental interventions. WHO identifies three key elements:
Good governance for health: policy‐makers across sectors make health a central concern, such as urban planning and taxation of harmful products.
Health literacy: people have the knowledge, skills and opportunities to make healthy choices, and demand better environments for health.
Healthy cities/communities: local leadership, preventive measures in neighborhoods and primary care systems foster healthier societies.
For organizations like ours, this framing underscores that health promotion is a strategic, holistic effort that spans governance, communication, community‐engagement and empowerment.
Video as a tool for health promotion
When we translate the above into practice, we find that using video, especially participatory, locally produced video, is a potent lever for health literacy, behaviour change and community voice. Here’s why:
Engagement and accessibility: Video captures attention, transcends literacy or language barriers and allows emotions, storytelling and local context to come alive.
Peer-to-peer credibility: When community members create and screen videos, the messaging comes from trusted voices rather than external “experts,” which builds authenticity while also reducing resistance.
Dialogue and reflection: Screening videos followed by discussions enables communities to reflect on norms, ask questions, re‐imagine behaviours and engage in healthy decision-making.
Scalability and flexibility: Videos can be adapted, translated, projected in different settings (community gatherings, schools, health posts) and combined with other modalities (dialogue, coaching, peer outreach).
Data and feedback loops: With video screenings and facilitated discussions, you generate real-time feedback on comprehension, attitudes and behavior change, enabling continuous improvement of the intervention.
Our initiative in Equatorial Guinea
Our team at illuminAid partnered with UNICEF and local implementing partners in Malabo and Bata, Equatorial Guinea to launch a youth‐centered Video Education Workshop (VEW) series.
Here’s how we put health promotion and video together:
Recognising that adolescent girls and young women often face heightened risks and barriers to accessing trusted health information and services.
We codeveloped a Social and Behaviour Change Communication (SBCC) strategy in which youth themselves became content creators and health advocates, designing videos on HIV prevention, stigma reduction, adolescent health and gender norms — issues they chose as relevant to their community realities.
These videos were screened during facilitated community dialogue sessions, opening peer-led conversations, building health literacy and enabling youth to lead.
The initiative will continue with a year-long capacity development plan, comprising quarterly coaching sessions for youth, a youth-led video creation incentive program and at least 75 video-projection events across the country, paired with community outreach and feedback collection.
This model embodies the core tenets of health promotion: empowering individuals (youth), creating environments for healthy choices (community screenings, peer exchange) and supporting governance/partnerships (UNICEF, local partners, youth teams). At the same time, video becomes the conduit that translates those ambitions into action.