Images for health: An illustration database for community-based health education, training, and practice

For 40 years, illustrations from Hesperian Health Guides have been cut, pasted, photocopied, and painstakingly re-drawn to create health materials by community health workers and educators who rely on easy-to-understand illustrations to teach health concepts across literacy levels and languages.  Today, new technology provides an opportunity to further facilitate localization and adaptation of health materials.

Using existing database software as a scaffold, Hesperian designed and field-tested a web-based database where INGO and community-based partners around the world can access field-tested line drawings relevant to a wide range of health issues and social settings.  After an iterative categorization systems testing process, Hesperian uploaded and tagged over 12,000 images from 20 books for easy search and retrieval. Images can be cropped, adjusted, and downloaded in various file formats to be used in posters, pamphlets, flipcharts, and web-based materials. A year of beta testing by 1,000 initial users provided detailed feedback on tagging, interface, and functionality, and resulted in a focus on intuitive search terms.

To date, Hesperian Images has been visited by over 11,000 individuals and organizations from 125 countries. Top search terms include “malaria,” “water,” “nutrition,” “breastfeeding,” “diarrhea,” and “pregnancy.” The images have been used for varying materials, including: signs for a patient hand washing area outside the bathroom of a birthing center in India, flyers about gender based violence in rural South Africa, coloring pages for teaching kids about the importance of hand washing in Nicaragua, and to aid with community mobilization for the construction of latrines in Haiti.