Empowerment through marketing and training: HINARI in non-English-speaking African countries

The HINARI Access to Research in Health programme has been available to most African countries for more than 12 years, but many institutions show low usage patterns of the 40 000 scientific online information resources available from more than 150 publisher partners. This usage pattern is more pronounced in non-English speaking countries. While a number of factors can contribute to this pattern, the most obvious contributor is likely to be the language in which the scientific literature is mostly published. Since there is little that an access programme can do to affect this, the authors set out to better understand other contributing factors. In 2012, the programme conducted a survey of institutions registered for the HINARI programme in francophone African countries and discovered that three key indicators of higher use patterns were marketing efforts, information literacy training activities, and the presence of a degreed librarian. This means that an effort to increase marketing and training activities and to advocate for the hiring of more degreed librarians can have an impact. In 2013, the programme initiated a similar investigation in eligible Portuguese-speaking countries, to determine whether these three factors present similarly. The paper will discuss the survey results in more depth and the subsequent effort to gather and disseminate successful marketing techniques and training plans to empower libraries no matter the language in which they operate.