The INFO Project Blog

“People sat in a theater for 12 hours listening to an audio drama,” said Population Media Center (PMC) president Bill Ryerson in a recent interview with the BBC’s Health Check reporter Claudia Hammond.

The drama, called Maleda, or Dawn, dealt with HIV transmission and targeted an at-risk population in Ethiopia.

We were excited to hear this broadcast because an upcoming issue of Population Reports will analyze the way this programming works, including PMC’s work in Ethiopia. Hammond’s interviews with PMC and excerpts from a riveting Mexican soap opera promoting family planning reveals the enormous country-wide popularity and impact entertainment-education programs can have.

“We had a cassette-based program that we handed out to truckers en route from Addis Ababa to Djibouti,” Ryerson tells Hammond in the broadcast, “they developed a shortage of blank cassette tapes along the truck route because people were making bootleg copies for their friends.”

A broadcast inside an Ethiopian theatre–12 straight hours of audio recording–found a rapt audience, according to Ryerson. The drama had measurable impact.

“We learned… truck drivers had made the decision to become monogamous… several sex workers reportedly have given up the work and gotten other jobs,” Ryerson says.

In an INFO-led Youth and Media e-forum from May, Ryerson led a discussion on radio-based interventions.

Entertainment programming attracts the biggest audiences. [They] become involved emotionally with the program–and in the case of drama, with the characters and their lives.

Ryerson wrote in a later exchange on this forum that in Ethiopia, PMC’s first long-running program cost just 4 US cents to reach each listener.  

Click on the icon to listen to Health Check’s take on Entertainment-Education. 

Stay tuned for the forthcoming INFO Reports guide to creating successful Entertainment-Education programming.