Media for Social Change

R-L: John Marks, Steve McDonald, John Siceloff, Sylvia Vollenhoven

Search for Common Ground founder and president, John Marks opened the Media as a tool for Social Change in Africa forum with a story from Burundi.

The country was the site of Search for Common Ground’s first entry into the medium of soap operas, after civil war and genocide had afflicted neighboring Rwanda. The main ethnic groups in Burundi were the same ones involved in the Rwandan genocide and there were very real fears that violence would spill across the border. John came up with the idea of using soaps to “change the thinking and mentality of society,” and the SFCG radio drama Our Neighbors, Ourselves, ended up reaching about 87% of the audience in Burundi and ran for over 10 years.

Building on that success, SFCG expanded to other countries, like Liberia where one soap in particular was so popular that the name of a corrupt character, Charles, became synonymous with corruption.  “You would hear people saying: ‘He’s such a Charles,’” John said.

The forum held by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, SFCG and The International Center for Journalists, was a dynamic discussion preceded by a showing of the PBS program NOW: “Soap Opera for Social Change,” about the SFCG series, The TEAM. Other panelists included John Siceloff, NOW executive producer  and Sylvia Vollenhaven, a Knight Development Journalism Fellow with experience creating soap operas in her home country of South Africa. Discussion was moderated by Steve McDonald, the consulting director of the Africa Program at the Wilson Center.

John Siceloff said that, in general, the market does not favor solution-oriented media. Still he opined that it was a great time for media for social change because communication is no longer 1-way. Audiences are more able to interact with and influence the media they consume. In Africa, Siceloff said mobile phone usage is increasingly important as an inexpensive way to access the web interact with media.

The reason soaps can be effective, Vollenhaven said, was because of compelling narratives. “Soap comes from our mythology,” she said. “It reaches us because it understands our storytelling.”  In a more media saturated environment like South Africa, she worried that shows like the TEAM would have to use more sophisticated storytelling. Using the example of Nollywood (Nigeria’s film industry which recently surpassed the US as the second largest in the world) she said that while production values were low, its popularity across Africa and the Caribbean comes from exciting storytelling.

Still, the field of media for social change is an evolving one, John stressed. For SFCG it has proved “and extraordinary medium with exciting and unexpected results,” he said.  While public health has used the soap opera format to communicate information and change behaviors, fewer people and organizations have utilized it for peace building and reconciliation. This means there is plenty of time and room to grow and adapt to rapidly evolving media environments.

You can watch the NOW program here.