Alliance electronic publications in popular demand
20 August 2008
The first half of 2008 has seen an exceptional demand for Alliance publications – particularly electronic publications. During the six-month period January–June 2008, nearly 350,000 electronic (PDF) resources were downloaded from the Alliance’s website.
There has been a particular interest in tools focused on young people. The Sexuality and life-skills manual came top of the download chart for this period, notching up 18,000 downloads in May 2008 alone. Related resources on preparing to teach, and teaching sexuality and life skills to young people also featured in the top ten, whilst the new interactive drama guide, Feel! Think! Act!, which aims to encourage young people to think about and take action to improve their sexual and reproductive health, was the second most downloaded resource from the Alliance website in the six month period.
The figures also reflect a continued demand for community mobilisation resources as well as resources in other languages. The Spanish language toolkit Diagnóstico Comunitario Participativo: paquete de herramientas (co-published by Colectivo Sol) and Tools Together Now (in English) were both very popular downloads.
The popularity of Alliance publications generally, and of electronic resources particularly, was borne out in the feedback from the Alliance’s recent Electronic communications survey. Over 80% of respondents reported to be either satisfied or very satisfied with the publications section of the Alliance’s website, and nearly three-quarters of respondents said that downloading a publication was easy.
However the survey also carried the message that electronic resources are still difficult to access in resource-poor settings. Whilst high numbers of orders for the Alliance’s CD-ROM show that there is an alternative to the problem of downloading publications where internet connectivity is not good or prohibitively expensive, one quarter of respondents said that they order hard copy publications because it is too costly or difficult to print electronic documents.
The Alliance disseminated over 21,000 hard copies of Alliance publications free of charge during January–June 2008. We are looking into alternative forms of funding to keep up with the continued demand for printed publications.
Top ten PDF downloads, January-June 2008
Title |
PDFs downloaded | |
| 1 | Sexuality and life skills manual | 34,249 |
| 2 | Feel! Think! Act! | 24,002 |
| 3 | Tools together now | 22,798 |
| 4 | Diagnóstico Comunitario Participativo: paquete de herramientas | 15,288 |
| 5 | Preparing to teach sexuality and life skills | 13,884 |
| 6 | Our future: Sexuality and life skills education for young people(grades 4-5) | 10,569 |
| 7 | Sex work, violence and HIV | 8,235 |
| 8 | Peer education training manual | 7,228 |
| 9 | Positive prevention | 7,090 |
| 10 | Teaching sexuality and life skills | 6,938 |
