The World Health Organization (WHO) representatives highlighted two factors that contribute to the rise in diabetes cases: 1) Obesogenic Environment and 2) the Lack of Public Health Awareness. Obesogenic Environment refers to an environment that helps or contributes to obesity (Harris, 2016).
Hence, the DEA Project’s mission is to address these by:
1. Providing health information to prevent diabetes using health communication strategies,
2. Encouraging public participation in diabetes prevention activities through health education programs, and
3. Advocating for public health awareness by introducing public health concepts
- The Problem We Are Tackling:
- 80% diabetic Indonesians do not realize they have diabetes as many believe diabetes is solely a genetic disease and are unaware of the causes, symptoms, and prevention methods. Moreover, in Indonesia, there is a high accessibility to high-density food and a high intake of saturated fat and sugar (Nurwanti et al., 2019). There is also a lack of infrastructure to encourage walking and exercising. These stem from the lack of education regarding public health issues, which is also rarely discussed in policy-making.
Our Strategy:
The Diabetes Education and Awareness (DEA) Project focuses on public health education because education is deemed as “the single most important modifiable social determinant of health” and can alter unhealthy behaviours (McGill, 2016).Our health education activities include Webinars, Yoga, Cooking Workshop, while our health communication efforts are mainly delivered through our social media platforms. Our expenses are expected to be mostly covered by our main source of funding - the Karyakarsa Donation platform, on top of other funding programs and partnerships we will seek out in the future.
For more information, find us on Instagram at @thedeaproject.
Feel free to contact us via email at projekdea.id@gmail.com for any inquiries.
Comments
This is a meaningful project aiming at raising the awareness of diabetes in Indonesians. However, one doubt is that the workshops may not be attractive enough because the yoga workshops mentioned might only target to the people interested in doing exercise and males might not be very interested in doing yoga. Is there a more attractive and interesting promoting method that can attract the people who are not interested in diabetes?