For full article, visit:

http://video.unfpa.org/

In Ethiopia, 74% of women age 15-49 have been circumcised. The harmful practice of female circumcision comprises all procedures involving partial or total removal of the external female genitalia. FGM frequently causes health complications that can last throughout a woman’s life and can even lead to death.

Cultural practices encourage women to be circumcised. Girls who are not circumcised are labeled as promiscuous, and, therefore, unworthy of marriage. The belief also exists that external female genitals are unclean. So despite the many unwarranted deaths, complications in pregnancy and childbirth, infection, and the psychological trauma caused by FGM, the practice is still practiced widely throughout Ethiopia, particularly in the Afar region.

The Ethiopian government’s population policy, health policy and women’s policy all promote eradication of harmful traditional practices, including FGM, yet social acceptance of the practice is still strong. Regardless of the fact that FGM is not religiously affiliated, many people relate FGM with religion, therefore involving religious leaders in any effort to eradicate the practice is crucial.

Sheik Mohammed Awael Hayat, President of the Supreme Sharia Court of the Afar region, gave opening remarks at PMC’s workshop. In his speech he declared that FGM was an inhumane practice and that the daughters of Prophet Mohammed have not been circumcised, therefore FGM has no religious grounds and should be discontinued. He asked that all zones teach to eliminate all forms of female circumcision.

The religious leaders discussed the issue of FGM at length, and each zone created an action plan to eradicate the practice. On August 1st the leaders came together to create and sign the following declaration.

1. We condemn all harmful traditional practices and female circumcision, of all types, as they do not have religious ground and support

2. We have committed ourselves to educate the public in mosques, schools, and other convenient places about the baseless belief that female circumcision is a religious obligation

3. We have given the responsibility of follow-up of this declaration to Islamic Affairs bureau, Office of the Supreme Sharia Courts and the Women’s Affairs Office of the region. We, religious leaders will do all in our capacities to mitigate and ultimately eliminate FGM

4. The role that all sector bureaus and particularly health, education, and culture and tourism bureaus can play in this endeavor is high. We thus call upon these government sectors to join their efforts in the elimination of these harmful traditional practices

5. We highly appreciate PMC and Save the Children Norway for their initiative to conduct research on harmful traditional practices in the region, its development of a four-year plan to work in Afar region and for organizing this awareness creation workshop for religious leaders. We call upon PMC to continue providing appropriate support in the future to the effort that will be to eliminate FGM in the region

This workshop was the first part of comprehensive strategy to eradicate the practice of FGM in Ethiopia, and the Afar region in particular. PMC uses a whole society strategy to strengthen the impact of communications initiatives. PMC-Ethiopia will soon launch its newest radio serial drama throughout Ethiopia with a storyline about the risks and negative consequences of FGM. The workshop was funded by Save the Children Norway.

Gender and Climate Change
The UN is formally committed to gender mainstreaming within all United Nations policies and programmes.

In all societies, in all parts of the world, gender equality is not yet realized. Men and women have different roles, responsibilities and decision making powers. This has consequences for the Climate Change process which make it important to integrate gender sensitivity into all mechanisms, policies and measures, and tools and guidelines within the climate debate. This message has been communicated by different individuals and organisations during the past COPs and in several publications.

For full article, visit:

http://www.gencc.interconnection.org/

This Web site aims to provide a platform for people interested in the issue of gender and climate change and to make the issue more accessible to everyone by providing a discussion list, publications, links and other useful information regarding the topic.

By Kim Ridley

Steamy tales of sex, betrayal and suspense can carry important social messages
Young and poor, Fikirte is in many ways Ethiopia’s Everywoman. Her life takes a turn for the worse when she meets Damtew, who is so obsessed with revenge against Fikirte’s innocent grandfather that he kills him and then begins to prey on her. He swindles Fikirte and seduces her half-sister, giving her HIV. He spreads vicious rumors to turn Fikirte’s family against her and to crush her dreams of finishing school. Still not satisfied, Damtew tries to murder Fikirte—twice.
Does Fikirte’s life sound like a soap opera? It is. The saga of Fikirte, Damtew, and the other captivating characters of Yeken Kignit (“Looking Over One’s Daily Life”) kept millions of Ethiopians glued to their radios for two and a half years. It also persuaded some of them to change their lives.

Yeken Kignit isn’t your run-of-the-mill melodrama. It’s a different kind of soap opera created to deliver life-saving messages in an entertaining way. These programs reach millions of people in Africa, Asia and Latin America with support from the U.S.-based Population Media Center (PMC), which uses the story lines of soaps to promote family planning, reproductive health and the elevation of women’s status in developing countries.

With the human family expected to grow from 6.5 billion to 9 billion in the next half-century, the need to stabilize the planet’s population is urgent. Scientists say we’ve already depleted 60 percent of the world’s farmlands, grasslands, forests, lakes and rivers. They constantly warn that we’re exceeding the planet’s capacity to support us. One effective way to lower birth rates, any family planning expert will tell you, is to empower women.

As unlikely as PMC’s strategy sounds, it’s working in places where more conventional efforts have failed. Demand for contraceptives skyrocketed 157 percent in Ethiopia during the 30 months that Yeken Kignit and a similar soap Dhimbibba (“Getting the Best Out of Life”) were broadcast, according to the PMC. Male listeners sought HIV tests at four times the rate of non-listeners, and use of family planning measures rose 52 percent among married women who listened to the programs.

To Dr. Negussie Teffera, former director of the National Office of Population in Ethiopia, it’s not an overstatement to say that programs like Yeken Kignit can help save lives. “In this country, family planning is not simply controlling fertility,” says Dr. Negussie, now PMC’s representative in Ethiopia. “It’s really saving lives, the lives of women.”

The more-than-15,000 letters that have flooded Teffera’s office in Addis Ababa speak for themselves. One woman wrote about how her husband had been pressuring her to have more kids even though her doctor had warned that it might kill her and the couple struggled to care for the five children they already had. Through listening to Yeken Kignit, she learned about birth control and the importance of family planning. The woman repeatedly discussed these matters with her husband until he relented. She now receives counseling and contraceptives at a nearby clinic. “I have regained my health,” she wrote. “Your program has benefited my husband and me and [my] family.”

Social-content soaps use storylines loaded with sex, love, betrayal, suspense and other standard soap-opera themes to keep audiences coming back for more. But beneath the steamy stories is a rigorous methodology developed in the 1970s by Miguel Sabido, then vice-president of the Mexican broadcasting network Televisa. Sabido pioneered new techniques for designing and producing telenovelas (the Spanish term for what Americans call soap operas) that captivate audiences while delivering important messages promoting literacy, family planning and other goals. Sabido says he aims to design programs for commercial television that “achieve a proven social benefit without lowering the ratings. If the ratings are low, few people are watching the program.”

At the heart of Sabido’s methodology is the development of characters who are good, bad, or like most of us, somewhere in between. It is these middle-of-the-road characters who typically have the strongest effects on audiences because we identify with them. As the stories unfold, these characters change and grow, and we come to see the value of the program’s underlying message.

Audiences form emotional bonds with these characters over the course of many episodes. This connection is key to the success of these programs, says PMC President Bill Ryerson. “Emotion is an aid to memory,” he says. “When people get information in a perfectly cognitive, dry form, they tend to forget it. So when ministries of health say, ‘Be faithful, use condoms,’ it’s not changing behaviour because people don’t internalize those messages. The long-running nature of soap operas allows audience members to get to know the characters on an emotional level and fall in love with some of them. They often start to model their behaviour after those characters.”

Epilogues following most broadcasts give audiences information on where and how to obtain more information and resources. This combination of emotion and information can produce powerful results. After watching a telenovela Sabido helped develop in the late 1970s to promote literacy, more than 800,000 Mexicans enrolled in adult-education classes. During the decade that his five telenovelas addressing family planning issues aired, population growth dropped by 34 percent. The United Nations presented its Population Prize to Mexico in 1986 as a result.

During that time Ryerson was working at the Washington, D.C.-based Population Institute, where his colleague David Poindexter learned of Sabido’s work and helped promote it in Asia and Africa. Poindexter eventually created his own non-profit and hired Ryerson to help with fundraising and evaluating the effects of new social-content soap operas.

Studying the effects of a radio soap in Tanzania in the 1990s about a philandering truck driver who contracts AIDS and the gradual awakening and empowerment of the character’s wife, Ryerson was struck by its far-reaching impact . His research found that 82 percent of listeners said the program had caused them to change their behaviour to avoid HIV. The cost of reaching those listeners: about 80 cents per person. “That data made me see the worth of forming an organization to take this program globally,” says Ryerson, who created the PMC in 1998 with the retired Poindexter serving as a consultant and honorary chair.

Today, PMC introduces talented young playwrights and scriptwriters around the world to Sabido’s methodology to help them create meaningful dramas for radio and television in their home countries. Following Sabido’s model, programs are aired only in places where social infrastructure already exists to deliver services that address the problems these socially conscious soaps explore—for example, adult education classes or family planning clinics. All the soaps begin with research into the important issues in people’s lives, which helps explain why these gripping dramas often become the most popular programs on the air.

Do the positive effects of social-change soap operas last? In Mexico, Miguel Sabido is examining that question 30 years after the broadcast of his first telenovela about literacy. He’s candid about what he is finding. “It was only a temporary change, so it will be important to write and broadcast new programs,” he says. “The main problem now is convincing network executives to air them.”

In the meantime, his methodology, which is being incorporated into graduate level entertainment-education courses at universities in the U.S., the Netherlands, and South Africa, continues to spread, leading to programs that touch millions of lives.

Although Yeken Kignit has ended, Fikirte’s triumphs and Damtew’s downfall still inspire people in Ethiopia. Hundreds of women are naming their daughters Fikirte. And responding to the powerful stories from the series, many Ethiopians are publicly denouncing the widespread practice of taking a bride by means of abduction and rape. Partly as a result of this public outcry, a crime that went largely unpunished now carries a minimum sentence of 10 to 15 years in prison, according to Dr. Negussie.

Findings from Ethiopia and elsewhere suggest that soap operas can be a powerful force for social change. “Entertainment media is an unusual way to address a serious problem,” Bill Ryerson admits, “but it’s the most effective thing we can think of to do to change the global situation.”

Western women of a certain age often talk about their “biological clock” – the physical imperative to bear children before it’s too late. But for Mother Earth, that clock is ticking for quite the opposite reason: She has too many children already, and if this terrible human fecundity is not slowed, it may indeed be too late – to feed the ones who are starving, or to sustain the ones who consume too much.

In this, Women’s History Month, it bears noting that the world’s women – and everyone else – will be history one day if there are too many of us scrabbling for a nipple on our universal mother, Planet Earth.

Alarmist? Not really. When the global population reached 6 billion last October, the organization Zero Population Growth issued a “Why 6 Billion?” awareness campaign, but few of us paid any attention – we were too busy worrying about far-more-hyped Y2K. The United Nations predicts that we will reach 8.9 billion in another 50 years; the amount of increase alone – 2.9 billion – was the entire human population in 1957. Even in Vermont, touted as having more cows than people not that long ago, overcrowding is evident in traffic congestion, bursting classrooms and suburban sprawl.

Ecologists and population watchdogs have long warned what environmental, social, economic and political disasters will ensue when the Earth has, for example, run out of oil, created deserts where forests once stood, and forced the world’s hungry and unemployed into desperate mutiny. Individuals who believe and expect that technology will solve all our problems need look no further than the SUV, which gulps down far more fossil fuel than the average family car. This vehicle’s invention and popularity symbolize, at the most basic level, the opposite of forward thinking.

Rapacious consumption is one side of the coin – the “developed” side, if you will; the humans-to-resources ratio is the other. And while countries like the U.S. are not immune to the numbers game – with 273 million, we’re the third most populous nation behind China and India – galloping birth rates are still the bane of the developing world.

If the predictions are grim, there is also reason for hope. That’s because even something as trenchant as fertility behavior – a.k.a. sex – can be modified.

Just ask Bill Ryerson. The Shelburne resident and president of the Population Media Center has seen with his own eyes the resounding success of a methodology designed to decrease birth rate, improve women’s status and, in some countries, decrease behaviors which spread sexually transmitted diseases.

That methodology? It’s called “soap opera.”

Yes, soaps, but with more thought, research, plot and character development – and social-change potential – than any number of episodes of “As the World Turns.” It’s officially called “entertainment-education,” and is based on the findings of American psychologist Albert Bandura that people learn, or relearn, behaviors by imitating others. In the absence of real-life role models, Ryerson explains, a soap opera creates sympathetic characters who model the desired behavior – and “bad” characters whose fate shows where their nefarious actions inevitably lead.

For example, Radio Tanzania produced a four-year serial, 1993 to ’97, with the goal of affecting family planning and AIDS prevention in a country where televisions are uncommon. In the program, a male character with indiscriminate mating habits – who was very interesting to male listeners – ended up dying a slow and torturous death from AIDS. Then executive vice president at the New York-based Population Communications International (PCI), Ryerson’s job was to measure the effectiveness of the Tanzanian show. He found, among other things, that 55 percent of the population ages 15 to 45 listened to it; 82 percent said in a survey that the show changed their behavior with regard to HIV/AIDS prevention.

The serial – its name translates to “Let’s Go With the Times” – also significantly affected attitudes and behaviors regarding family size, contraception and personal responsibility versus “fate” as a determinant of the number of children families have.

“It was by far the country’s most popular show,” Ryerson says. “And there was a 150 percent increase in the use of condoms.”

Ryerson’s career trajectory has centered around family planning and population issues for three decades, from the time he abandoned PhD studies in biology at Yale in 1970 for a more engaging position at the Population Institute in Washington, D.C. “I decided the population field was more interesting than insects,” he quips. That career included a five-year stint in the ’80s as associate director of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England – the job that brought him to Vermont.

As his work is now predominantly overseas, where Ryerson lives in the U.S. is somewhat irrelevant; he and his wife Leta Finch, with their daughter, are happy to remain in the woodsy environs of Shelburne – but not far from an airport.

With his neatly trimmed beard, conventional clothes and mild manner, the 55-year-old Ryerson looks more like a professor than an international mover-and-shaker. But since leaving PCI and founding the nonprofit Population Media Center in 1998, Ryerson has traveled the globe on a mission near-impossible: to “bring about stabilization of human population numbers at a level that can be supported sustainably by the world’s natural resources” and to “lessen the harmful impact of humanity on the earth’s environment.”

If it sounds overwhelming, at least Ryerson’s medium – the soap opera – is entertaining. With funding help from other international non-governmental and private organizations, Ryerson facilitates the development of soaps, and the evaluation of their effects – “There’s a lot of hand-shaking,” he says modestly of his role as initiator. The programs are specifically designed for a target culture; importantly, the creators and actors of the resulting radio or TV soap are all “in-country” – people who understand the culture and its values – not Westerners.

Entertainment-education was not Ryerson’s invention, though; he’s quick to credit Miguel Sabido with that.

In the 1970s Sabido was a vice president with Televisa, the dominant multi-media conglomerate in Mexico, and a leading producer and playwright. He had thought a lot about how to promote social change, according to Ryerson, and discovered Bandura’s “social learning theory” backed by studies which indicated “people of all ages learn by example.”

Following an interview with Bandura, a professor at Stanford University, Sabido came up with the idea of telenovelas – soap operas – that would create role models to influence social values and behaviors. His first series, in 1974, was actually about literacy – or rather, illiteracy and its effects. Describing Sabido’s technique, Ryerson says, “He always created middle-of-the-road characters, and positive and negative characters who try to influence the middle-of-the-road people. The negative ones add drama; the ambivalent ones go back and forth but ultimately adopt positive values.”

Sabido’s illiterate soap characters suffered from poverty, unemployment and embarrassment, just like much of Mexico’s citizenry at that time. The program was a smash hit, with a 33 percent viewership nationwide. An epilogue to the show informed viewers how they, too, could learn to read and change their lives. A quarter-million people showed up at literacy offices in Mexico City the day after one of the characters took the same step; ultimately, 840,000 people signed up for courses.

This astonishing success not only validated Sabido’s soap-opera methodology; it encouraged him to tackle another subject: contraception.

“Acompaname,” which translates “Come With Me,” would prove to be the prototype for other countries as well. This serial, which ran over two years, featured a fairly typical, poor young family. The mother, a sympathetic but ignorant character, was desperate to stop at the three children she already had but didn’t know how. Her husband, macho and lusty, resented her efforts to try the rhythm method. Over a period of time, and many melodramatic arguments and tears, the woman decided to seek the advice of another she knew who had “miraculously” restricted her family size. Eventually, she learned about birth control. By the time she and her smiling husband walked out of the gynecologist’s office with a prescription in hand, values had changed – in this family and among viewers – about ideal family size, about not having more children than one can afford, and about the woman’s role in her family.

“Following the show there was a 33 percent increase in family planning appointments at clinics” around the country, notes Ryerson. “Contraceptive sales increased 23 percent in one year.”

It was critical that attitudes were slowly influenced over a significant period of time. “You can’t change people very, very rapidly overnight,” he cautions. “The way to bring about meaningful change is in maybe 50 or more episodes, to hook people on the characters and issues. Then finally you put the characters, that the audience is fond of, in some situation where they gradually adopt new behaviors. The audience hangs in there.”

“Acompaname” hinted at what population and family planning experts would soon corroborate worldwide: The number-one factor in reducing birth rates is the empowerment of women – even if only with the choice to use contraceptives.

Over the next decade, and with continued family-planning soap operas, Mexico’s birth rate would decline by 34 percent, earning the country the United Nations Population Prize in 1986.

At the time of Sabido’s initial successes on Mexican television in the ’70s, Ryerson was working at Washington’s Population Institute as the director of the Youth and Student Division. His colleague at the institute’s Communications Center was David Poindexter, a man who would influence American television throughout the decade – particularly director Norman Lear – to incorporate family planning, gender roles and other issues into prime-time programming.

“David got several story lines into shows like “Maude,” says Ryerson. “She had a change-of-life pregnancy – Lear said years later that David got her pregnant – and this was before Roe vs. Wade. She had an abortion.” Poindexter also had something to do with Michael, a.k.a. “Meathead” on “All in the Family” getting a vasectomy.

American television was more liberal then, and Poindexter’s influence was not insignificant; even so, the social-issue episodes were usually “one-shot deals,” says Ryerson. When Poindexter learned of Sabido’s success in Mexico, he was impressed with the long-running series and its results. He personally encouraged Televisa to produce more family-planning soaps, and to get Miguel Sabido to train broadcasters in other developing countries in his methodology.

Poindexter took Sabido to India to meet then-President Indira Gandhi. In a previous population-reduction effort, she had authorized an involuntary sterilization campaign, Ryerson explains, which had been a complete disaster. But Gandhi knew the power of television; she had lost votes where there was no TV. “She had the ministry install a transmitter a day until the entire country was covered by television,” says Ryerson. “But it was god-awful; no one watched it.”

Enter Sabido. With his help and training, India introduced its first-ever soap opera in 1984, “Hum Log,” which translates “We People.” The 17-month series achieved 60 to 90 percent ratings; evaluators reported that 70 percent of the viewers said they had learned from “Hum Log” that women should have equal opportunities; 68 percent said they learned women should have the freedom to make personal decisions; and 71 percent said family size should be limited. “People remembered what happened to the characters,” Ryerson recalls, “as if they were their own family.”

From the Population Institute, Ryerson had moved on to development jobs at Planned Parenthood in Pennsylvania, then Vermont. Meanwhile, Poindexter facilitated a second soap in India, and took the methodology to Radio Kenya, again with favorable results: Contraceptive use increased 58 percent in Kenya, and desired family size declined from 6.3 to 4.4 children per woman.

In 1985 Poindexter founded Population Communications International in New York, on the heels of the second U.N. conference on population in Mexico City. “It was clear that what was required was a truly international organization with a focus on population,” says Poindexter, reached by phone at his suburban Portland, Oregon, home. “I needed someone who was competent and knew how to raise money, and I knew Bill was the best person in the world.”

Poindexter didn’t have to twist his arm to get back into population work. Ryerson joined PCI as executive vice president; his first task was designing the evaluation of India’s second soap opera. Projects followed in Brazil, Tanzania, the Philippines and Madagascar.

But it was that extensive, four-year Radio Tanzania study in the mid-’90s that particularly affected Ryerson’s subsequent efforts in other African countries – both for PCI and, now, for Population Media Center.

“He didn’t know much about radio or mass communications when he started,” Poindexter says, “but he’s become a master. The project in Tanzania is a landmark because Bill helped design scientific evaluation research and nailed down the fact that [the soap-opera methodology] really worked. He’s really more of a scientist than I am.”

Now, with Ryerson at the helm of his own nonprofit, the “semi-retired” Poindexter serves as its Honorary Chair and consultant. “Bill asked if I would help if he started a new organization, but Bill is the central figure. I’m amazed at him at times; he’s increasingly omni-competent. He’s very good, and frankly, very good is required right now. Africa is going down the tubes unless someone can step in and affect reproductive health and birth rates.”

“He is excellent with people in different cultures,” concurs Dr. Christine Galavotti, chief of the Behavioral Research Unit, HIV Section, at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. She accompanied Ryerson on a recent trip to Ethiopia, where he is facilitating the development, training and technical assistance for a radio program. “I have been very impressed with his energy, his ability to talk with potential collaborators, to build collaborative relationships with other organizations, with ministries of health,” Galavotti adds. “People welcome the PMC into the ‘family’ of other, existing organizations in the country.”

Galavotti went to CDC to do HIV prevention work and has long been interested in sexual-behavior change. “We’ve done a lot of community-based projects, but this methodology is so exciting,” she says of the enter-education strategy. “It has the potential for a powerful effect, and to reach a large audience.” A psychologist, Galavotti says she’d like to see the methodology tested on inner-city youth in the U.S. – say, “on a good cable show during a time that young people will watch. We’re a TV society, people do follow shows, get to know the characters. I really think this could work.”

Ryerson is interested, too, in how well the telenovela approach might work in a more media-savvy country. “We’re talking to a cable producer who wants to have a station for urban America to help black youth with issues that affect their lives,” he notes.

But right now, his PMC agenda is overflowing with projects in Africa. That trip to Ethiopia, where Ryerson is setting up a locally managed office for project development, included stops in Uganda and Kenya – where a TV producer plans to create a version of “Wheel of Fortune” with questions about family planning. “We’re looking at a project in Ghana,” he adds. “There’s a staff in Mexico City working on a radio project for young people. We’re trying a variety of new strategies.” And then, long-term, there’s China, the Philippines and back to India.

Time is of the essence – and Ryerson is one male acutely aware of that biological clock. How could there ever be enough time to persuade the world that “zero population growth” is a good thing? If facing down the global billions seems like waking up to a daily disaster, Ryerson’s calm and amiable demeanor doesn’t let it show. His remedy to getting depressed is to simply keep working. “It’s knowing that I can make some contribution,” he says.

“My belief is that it’s better to do what we can now and avoid whatever we can of what perils face us in the future,” Ryerson adds. “There is a lot of evidence indicating we may have a huge ecological catastrophe in the next 50 years.” The population issue, he says, is like a car hurtling down the road: “Some people are driving it faster, some are trying to apply the brakes – and some politicians are saying we don’t have a problem yet.”

© Copyright Seven Days
Courtesy of the author

The program deals with the major themes of HIV/AIDS education and the importance of educating women as a means to a better life, and the minor themes of female circumcision, negative consequences of too much drinking and gambling, and pre-natal care.

Through the characters of Hamid and Jabir, the program addresses the importance of reducing stigma of people living with HIV/AIDS and shows how one can interact with those who have AIDS. Hamid (a transitional character) is HIV positive and is refused a job by Jabir. Hamid’s wife’s former husband, Al Dai (another transitional character), comes to take his children away and declares that it is not safe for kids to live with someone who has AIDS. Later in the program, we will see that Jabir’s other evil-doings – stealing money, lying, blackmailing – lead to his assassination. Al Dai will grow to learn to accept people living with HIV/AIDS.

Through the character of Awatif, the program will address the issue of family planning and pre-natal care. Awatif, Hassan’s wife, suffers from acute anemia resulting from non-birth spacing, and repeated, prolonged bleeding from the births of her many children. She is in the process of delivering another child and encountering complications in delivery because she had become so run-down with running the household and having an office job while pregnant. After recovering from her terrible, but not lethal childbirth, Awatif slowly comes to realize that it is hard to pay the school fees for all of her children. Her former husband convinces her to take him back (he had left her to pursue another woman), but she agrees only if he will agree to use condoms. Hassan refuses. Awatif and Hassan will fight over this, but eventually Awatif will overcome.

Population Media Center is a non-profit, non-governmental organization dedicated to using media to aid the stabilization of human population numbers at a level that can be sustained by the world’s natural resources and to lessen the impact of humanity on the earth’s environment. Its work emphasizes education on the benefits of small families, elevation of women’s status, promotion of gender equity and encouragement in the use of effective family planning methods.

Shelburne, Vermont, USA- In response to problems related to the exploitation of children in western Africa, Population Media Center (PMC) is launching a new behavior change communication project that will support the protection of children, promote reproductive health, and avoidance of HIV/AIDS in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Ivory Coast.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) will fund the new $1.3 million two-year project that will include six months of formative research and training and eighteen months of production and broadcast of a serial radio drama using the Sabido methodology for behavior change (accompanied by monitoring and evaluation research).

The radio program will address issues related to child protection, trafficking of children across international borders and the link between this problem and poverty-inducing factors such as unplanned childbearing. The program will also confront underlying issues (such as insufficient family income) that put children at risk of exploitative labor situations.

Often, children or their parents believe that offers of employment (such as on cocoa plantations) for their children will result in added income to the family, while in reality, such offers sometimes lead to long hours of hard labor with little or no pay, and frequent beatings or other physical abuse.

Population Media Center (PMC) is a non-profit, non-governmental organization that works worldwide with the broadcast media, educating people about the benefits of small families; promoting the protection of children from exploitation, elevating the status of women; promoting the use of effective family planning methods; and motivating behavior change for the avoidance of HIV/AIDS.

The U.S. Agency for International Development administers the U.S. foreign assistance program providing economic and humanitarian assistance in more than 80 countries worldwide.

Radio can influence behavior when programs include social content. Entertainment-education, radio programming and HIV/AIDS prevention were the main topics discussed during a UNFPA training workshop organized by the Culture, Gender and Human Rights branch. Last week, UNFPA, The United Nations Population Fund, in collaboration with Population Media Center, launched a weeklong training workshop for local FM radio stations and non-governmental, reproductive health service organizations from Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, South Africa, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and Namibia.

The workshop on entertainment-education strategies and HIV/AIDS is part of the project Strengthened Partnerships among Local FM and Community Radio Networks and Reproductive Health Agencies on HIV/AIDS. Participants were selected based on on-going collaboration with the UNFPA country programmes, and a needs assessment questionnaire that was distributed to radio stations and NGOs in 12 sub-Saharan African countries with high rates of HIV infection. A similar pilot workshop will be held in Asia in May.

Communication strategies such as the Sabido methodology for behavior change, radio drama script writing, social merchandizing and audience research and monitoring as well as issues related to gender sensitivity, HIV/AIDS research, and discrimination, were also discussed.

Also present at the workshop were representatives from UNAIDS, One World Radio, Free Play Radio, South Africa’s Department of Communications, Love Life, Soul City, the Reproductive Health Research Unit, the HIV Paranatal Unit, ABC Ulwazi, and AMARC, all of whom shared information through presentations and lively debates. As a result of these exchanges, participants expanded their knowledge and their networks.

The aim of the project is to develop effective, compelling and culturally relevant communications on HIV/AIDS by strengthening partnerships among local FM radio networks and health and education, youth and women community-based organizations. The project is funded through UNAIDS and UNFPA. Co-implementing agencies are UNFPA and Population Media Center.

Population Media Center, Inc. (PMC) is a non-profit, non-governmental organization that works worldwide with the broadcast media to motivate people to achieve small family norms through family planning; to take effective measures to prevent sexually transmitted diseases, such as AIDS; and to respect equal rights for women. PMC is based in the United States.
UNFPA extends assistance to developing countries, countries with economies in transition and other countries at their request to help them address reproductive health and population issues and raises awareness of these issues in all countries, as it has since its inception.
PMC provides the technical assistance for the curriculum, inventory, needs assessment and training of radio stations for the project. UNFPA Culture, Gender and Human Rights Branch developed the project concept and proposal; it also coordinates inputs from UNFPA Country Offices in identification of countries, radio stations, health agencies and personnel.

By the end of the week, participants had committed plans to enhance their own radio programmes and the need for entertaining, accurate and culturally relevant programming to address HIV/AIDS.

One South African participant said, “Recognize you always need to learn from others. The media has power. So recognize and accept it. Recognize that people like to see themselves reflected back at them. They want characters to relate to.” She added, “In order to change a society, you need to change its ideas about itself. You need to target preconceived notions and stereotypes about gender, class and race. You need to reflect that community back to itself, so that they can see not so much their problems but rather the things that need to be rectified in their society.”