Few health workers in Latin America are trained in how to produce effective and appropriate health education materials. In order to provide an instrument and a strategy to help overcome this problem, the Pan American Health Organization developed an effective methodology to orient the design, use, and evaluation of health education materials. This article describes the development of this methodology and summarizes the basic operating principles and criteria for evaluation. These operating principles include developing educational materials from the community perspective, ensuring that they are an integral part of a health education program, relating them to health services delivery, pretesting the materials, and distributing instructions for use along with these materials. An evaluation scale helps health personnel assess materials that have been designed elsewhere and decide if they would be appropriate for their own target audiences. The scale also promotes self-evaluation by the community in the development of its own materials. This simple and straightforward methodology has been successfully applied in courses and seminars as well as in the design, use, and evaluation of health education materials throughout Latin America.
