The Global Health Media Project designs, develops, and distributes educational videos that are tailored to the needs of health workers and populations in low-resource settings. Filmed on location with real patients and medical staff, their freely accessible videos provide step-by-step guidance on a variety of subjects, from childbirth and newborn care, to nutrition and infectious disease prevention. Funded through a combination of individual donations and foundation grants, the Global Health Media Project has partnered with over 9,000 organizations across  the globe—ranging from the Médecins Sans Frontieres to UNICEF—who in turn direct patients and healthcare workers to the project’s YouTube channel.

COVID-19 Response

With in-person training restricted, the reach of the Global Health Media Project expanded significantly during the pandemic. During the first three months of 2020, their website’s traffic more than doubled. Additionally, a video produced by the organization in February of 2021, “The Story of Coronavirus,” which explains how to prevent the disease, has been viewed almost 13 million times on YouTube.

Theory of Change

Leveraging the internet and mobile technologies enables healthcare to reach millions of patients cost-effectively and across vast distances, thereby reducing health inequality and providing a novel avenue of access for the right to health.

Activities

Designed to address an urgent global health issue—often relating to newborn and maternal care—the organization’s videos are written in close collaboration with medical experts. Shot on location in facilities across the developing world, the videos seek to capture a realistic healthcare scenario that is nevertheless accessible to a general audience. Though their videos are published on the internet for free, the Global Health Media Project frequently partners with other institutions, ranging from small hospitals to large inter-governmental organizations, who incorporate their videos into their own routine training materials.

Results

To date, the Global Health Media Project has produced more than 200 videos. Translated into 113 languages and viewed over 955 million times—at a rate of about 500,000 views a day—their videos reach a truly global audience. For their work, the organization has been recognized in numerous film festivals and has been given top prizes at the Cannes World Film Festival, Istanbul Film Awards, and the Calcutta International Film Festival.