Sex sells: a tiny nonprofit uses mass media to encourage family planning

Earth Island Journal, Summer, 2009 by Jason Mark

Fikrite is a girl in trouble. Her grandfather has just died and now a neighbor, a man named Damte, has taken over the house and is trying to turn the place into a bar and brothel. Fikrite says she won't allow it, so Damte starts spreading rumors about the girl and soon everyone, including her boyfriend, thinks that she is hiding a child born out of wedlock. Damte then seduces Fikrite's stepsister, Lamrot, gets her hooked on booze and drugs, and knocks her up. When Lamrot tries to abort the pregnancy, she almost bleeds to death and lands in the hospital, where she finds out that she is HIV-positive.

If this sounds like overcooked melodrama--well, that's the point. The story comes from "Yeken Kignit" ("Looking Over One's Life"), a radio soap opera that gripped much of Ethiopia for 257 episodes beginning in 2002. The show had all of the elements that make serial dramas popular: sex, romance, mischief, betrayal, suspense. But the wildly successful program--which reached more than one half of Ethiopian adults during its two-year run and sparked a craze for naming baby girls Fikrite--wasn't designed just for entertainment. Produced by a small US organization called the Population Media Center (PMC), the show was written with the express purpose of encouraging family planning, women's empowerment, and HIV/AIDS awareness. Not all the listeners knew this, however, and that was also the point.

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Since 1998, PMC has created dozens of radio soap operas like "Yeken Kignit" for listeners in Rwanda, Senegal, Vietnam, the Philippines, Mexico, and 10 other countries. The group has used its shows to warn against female genital mutilation, highlight domestic violence, and demonstrate the most hygienic way of slaughtering a chicken. Crafted by local writers working in local languages and dialects, the programs take typical family situations, give them some dramatic spice, and then weave together a cast of characters and a slew of plots designed to foster powerful emotional bonds among the listeners--bonds strong enough, the shows' creators hope, to prompt changes in real-life behaviors.

"These bonds mean that the characters can be hugely influential, both emotionally and intellectually, with the audience," says William Ryerson, who founded PMC after spending more than 30 years working at other NGOs focused on population stabilization. "So if they [the listeners] are making a decision about how many children to have or when to get married, or whether to insist on condom use, the characters can be dealing with the same issue and really allow the audience to see some innovative techniques for dealing with the situation."

Of course, using entertainment as a medium for education is a device as old as biblical parables. Even the crudest propagandist can find a way to fold a glib lesson into an interesting tale. All too aware that didactic dialogue would be the death of their programs, the PMC producers are careful to avoid pedantry. Their goal, they say, is to ensure that the tale takes precedence over the teaching, because if the programs aren't genuinely popular, they won't achieve their education goals. In prioritizing good old-fashioned storytelling, the PMC programs are more like the socially conscious sitcoms of Norman Lear than a public service announcement.

"If you don't have an audience, you don't have anything," says Virginia Carter, a PMC board member who regularly travels to other countries to train local writers in crafting a gripping soap opera. Before joining PMC, Carter worked as a writer-producer on "All in the Family," "Maude," and "The Jeffersons." She says, "People have seen the billboards and the posters, but they are tired of it, they are bored with it. It's too late for pamphlets--you need to use the airwaves to reach more people."

The PMC programs go beyond the casual "awareness raising" of what (at least in the US) is considered provocative entertainment. PMC producers combine a writer's zeal for sizzling stories with a social scientist's passion for quantifiable metrics. Before any show is aired, PMC producers measure what listeners know about given topics, investigate the social services that are available to listeners, and closely study available demographic data. A detailed understanding of the target audience determines the timing of the broadcast and the broadcast area. Focus groups help writers to know the listeners' existing attitudes on controversial issues. The lives of the characters in the PMC dramas may be chaotic, but the programs themselves are precision focused. "Before we begin, before we choose the specific subjects, we get the government to sign off," Carter says. "Then we send demographers into the country, and we ask what people think. We ask, 'Do you think girls should be educated? Do you know where to get condoms? Do you know where HIV comes from?'

"In writing and producing, we use a technique called the 'Sabido Method.' That sounds high falutin!, doesn't it? But it's really pretty simple."