Shifting Cultural Norms Through Storytelling: How Population Media Center Tackles Global Challenges
$0.08 to save a life. That’s the cost in Tanzania per person for measurable HIV prevention. That’s just one of the success stories from Bill Ryerson with Population Media Center.
Contrast that with the D.A.R.E. program that cost as much as $750 million dollars a year. And it didn’t move the needle.
Bill and his team work to shift cultural norms around challenging societal issues across the globe – like in Ethiopia, doubling the number of male listeners (from 33% to 66%) who thought it appropriate for a woman to run for higher office. Or reporting child slavery in Haiti, human trafficking prevention in Burkina Faso, or reducing teen pregnancy in Mexico.
They have used this strategy in 57 countries so far.
In each of these cases, they are leveraging narrative storytelling – to engage the public in characters they care about who struggle through difficult topics via long-running serial radio dramas or telenovelas.
The stories are written and created by locals in their own country. This isn’t a top-down colonialist imposing their value system on others.
They are seeking funding to expand this to more areas that are clamoring for their help.
Lots of amazing stories on their website: www.populationmedia.org
Podcast Transcript
Jacob: [00:00:00] Welcome to Impact Stories. I’m here with Bill. Please introduce yourself.
Bill: Jacob, thanks so much for having me on. I’m Bill Ryerson. I am founder and president of Population Media Center.
Jacob: Tell me about the good you’re trying to make in the world.
Bill: A lot of people are prevented from improving their health or their economic welfare because of misinformation, or cultural barriers that prevent them from taking steps to improve their situation. And so our work is using mass media to role model behaviors that can be healthful and helpful economically for people. Through creating long running serialized dramas in which characters evolve into role models for the audience and show the benefits of the new behavior and show the audience how to deal with pushback that comes when you try something non traditional in any particular culture.
Jacob: How do these narratives tend to take shape? How are they distributed in these communities?
Bill: In any society, there are cultural realities that one needs to [00:01:00] understand. And our overall goal is creating a sustainable planet with equal rights for all. So, our formative research in any country looks at what are the barriers to achieving the goals of that country, where the behavior of the public are failing to achieve things like the sustainable development calls. So we create a policy framework. We check it with the government. We take out any policy that counters human rights or UN agreements. And then we create characters, and storylines. Both urban and rural and peri urban, in which key characters are struggling with key issues in that country. And they may be anything from biodiversity loss and deforestation, to poor maternal and child health, to poverty.
And over time, our characters in each setting are trying to figure out how to improve their situation. And the characters are designed to be right in the middle of the cultural road, and they’re designed to be [00:02:00] aspirational characters for the audience. And so over what can be 150 or 200 episodes the transitional characters try different strategies and find out the hard way in front of a mass audience, what works and what doesn’t work. And eventually they evolve into positive role models for the audience. They show the benefits of the new behaviors and help the audience with understanding how to deal with the reaction that sometimes comes from doing something nontraditional, like sending your daughter to school instead of marrying her off at age 14. So we’re able to actually show consequences that the audience might not otherwise learn except for the School of Hard Knocks.
We’re able through these programs to measure changes in knowledge, attitudes, and behavior among our viewers or listeners. This started with telenovelas in Mexico, and it’s still a telenovela type model, although in many African countries radio is the dominant medium so we’re doing radio programs there, [00:03:00] but we’re doing telenovelas still in Mexico dealing with things like teen pregnancy, and we’ve done one in the U. S. addressing teen pregnancy as well.
Jacob: Can you give me a case study or like in a specific example of what the results were?
Bill: Our first of nine programs on Radio Ethiopia pulled in 46% of the population, and it was a new phenomenon. They had not had serial dramas on Radio Ethiopia before that. And so, more or less, even numbers of men and women, 47% of men, 45% of women and the listeners followed these characters as they struggled with various issues. And over time, as the audience fell in love with the key characters, those characters started trying various things. So for example, one of the key storylines was about family planning use and a character named Fakurta persuaded her mother that she should use Family planning. And she realized health and economic welfare [00:04:00] benefits by spacing and limiting her family size. Because large family size in many countries is a surefire formula for poverty. With children that people can’t afford to feed, let alone educate. So, we did a baseline survey of about 3, 000 people before the show went on the air and a post broadcast survey. And we did interviews at 48 reproductive health clinics across the country asking 14,400 new reproductive health clients what had motivated their decision to seek services. In that research, we found that 26% of the new clients named this program as the primary factor that made them decide to come for family planning. In the end line survey, we found among the 45% of married women who were listening, they had gone from 14% self-reported use of contraception at the beginning of the program to 40% use of contraception by the end of the program. So effectively a tripling, while non listeners had [00:05:00] had a marginal increase.
And we also measured other changes. So we had a story in that program about a woman who ran for higher office. And the baseline, the women were pretty okay with that idea, but only one third of men thought it was appropriate for a woman to run for higher office. By the end of the show, 66%t of male listeners thought it was appropriate for a woman to run for higher office, so we saw a doubling in positive attitudes. We also addressed marriage by abduction. If you don’t know this practice, it has to do with school girls being raped and then being forced to marry their rapist to save the family name. And so we had this situation in the program and one of the characters managed to escape from her forced marriage and be able to lead a more or less normal life. And that storyline generated 25, 000 letters from listeners, one of which said, thank you for dealing with the issue of marriage by abduction. Our own daughter [00:06:00] was abducted on her way to school at age 14 and ended up married as a result, and we’ve been afraid to send the 12 year old girls to school for fear the same thing might happen to them. When your program addressed this issue through the character Wuballam, our entire village came together and we agreed to enforce the law against marriage by abduction and now it’s safe for our girls to go to school. Please keep your program on the air.
Jacob: How did you end up creating these kinds of storylines to help shift public perception
Bill: so, I’m trained as an ecologist and left graduate school concerned about Environmental sustainability. And obviously numbers of people and their behaviors are key factors with regard to issues like deforestation and climate change. So I started looking at the whole area of family planning, realized that the dominant reasons people give for non use of contraception. have to do with misinformation about safety and effectiveness, male opposition, and religious opposition. [00:07:00] Only 1% of non users cite lack of access as the reason. So, most people in most countries are aware of contraception and how to find it and where to find it. They just have misinformation about safety or effectiveness, or they’re facing opposition from somebody.
Having people understand the health and economic benefits of delaying marriage until adulthood and spacing of children and limiting the numbers of children, it takes some time. It just doesn’t happen overnight. You can’t just tell somebody what to do and nobody wants to be told what to do. So, I realized when I came across a Mexican telenovela producer at Televisa in Mexico doing a telenovela dealing with a decision by a couple to use family planning that storytelling might be a useful approach. What happened by the end of that program, with 29% of the nation’s viewers watching it, was a 33% increase in clinic attendance and a 23% increase in the sale of contraceptives and pharmacies. So when I [00:08:00] saw that, I said, okay, this is a strategy that can be highly effective at helping people understand the choices they are making without ever telling them what to do. It’s a human rights based approach. So I got involved in measuring the impact of such a program in Tanzania. Dealing with HIV prevention and family planning use, and there were dramatic differences between the areas where they got the program and the areas where they did not get the program in terms of knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. And the clinic data showed that in the non broadcast area, there was zero change in the number of new family planning adopters at Ministry of Health clinics, while in the broadcast areas, there was a 32% increase. And there were dramatic changes with regard to HIV prevention, particularly condom use in areas only where it was broadcast.
So we calculated the cost per person who adopted family planning in that study of the entire program and all the research, and it came out to [00:09:00] 32 cents US. And the cost per person who changed behavior to avoid HIV was 8 cents. So at that point, I realized when you can save lives at eight cents a person and help people understand benefits of health behaviors like use of family planning there’s nothing more cost effective for improving health and economic welfare and started Population Media Center. And so far, we’ve used this strategy in 57 countries.
Jacob: From your experience, why do you think storytelling is so much more effective than just telling? Why have you found that using stories has been more powerful?
Bill: People make most of their decisions in the parts of their brain that deal primarily with emotion. This is the work of Paul McLean, a brain scientist. And while we think of ourselves as rational, we also are influenced by emotion. And so, if you are driving home and you witness a terrible auto accident, you’re more likely to remember that than you are to remember the average day when you’re commuting and you see nothing.
I can [00:10:00] remember having flown to New York on September 11, 2001, and what I witnessed in the city that day far more clearly than I can remember things 10 years or 20 years more recently. Emotion. An emotional engagement enhances memory. And so storytelling is dealing with people’s emotions. And when you have emotion and rationality put together, it’s more impactful and far more memorable than just information.
Jacob: Tell me about your approach to getting these stories told and created
Bill: We do extensive formative research in each country, including understanding what the policies of the country are, and understanding the views and concerns of the public who ultimately will be in the audience. We then look at the places where the general behavior of the public is out of line with what is in their health or economic welfare interest. So for each issue, we create values based on the policies of the country. And 100% of our country staff, including [00:11:00] all the writers and actors, are country nationals. So it’s country staff talking to their government about how best to achieve these policy goals, and our programs then are written in local languages and the audience is seeing or hearing a program that is totally in line with their cultural reality.
And we find over and over people write letters or text messages to us saying, how did you know my uncle so well that you created him as a character. So we’re very good at understanding people’s realities and then telling stories based in part on the real lives of people our researchers have met.
Jacob: So what is it that you’re most looking for right now? What are the hurdles you’re facing?
Bill: The major barrier to our growth is lack of revenue. We have had very successful programs. And in fact, as I mentioned, we created a Hollywood show that became the longest running program in the history of the network, Hulu. And for people in this country who have access to [00:12:00] Hulu they can watch our show East Los High, which is all about teen pregnancy in East Los Angeles, among Hispanic teens. But those kinds of commercial operations are not the norm with us. Most of our programs are supported philanthropically by UN agencies and embassies, and funding has been in decline by those entities for some time. So it’s really our goal that we should be on the air all the time in at least 50 countries, as opposed to the dozen that we’re doing programs in at the moment.
And so expanding both philanthropic support and expanding commercial engagement with commercial entities underwriting shows and realizing advertising benefits are part of what we’re pursuing to try to expand the organization and to have sustained impact in countries where we don’t want to do one two year show and then stop.
We want to do 20 years of programming in order to help people move to a much more healthful and, a [00:13:00] happy family life and way of living.
Jacob: How would you describe an ideal donor or investor in your organization
Bill: We have some who are really wonderful, who have funded whole programs, individuals as well as foundations and UN agencies and embassies, and corporations. So a lot of our donors will identify issues that they want addressed in a particular country. And that’s fine, because we’re happy to do that. But we also have donors who say they know that we need unrestricted support to expand our work and to explore doing projects in new countries. And so some of our most important funding comes in the form of unrestricted donations.
Jacob: If someone was interested in learning more about your organization, where would you point them?
Bill: Of course our website populationmedia.org. I’m also happy to answer questions ryerson@populationmedia.org and I think one who gets onto our website will see that there are a lot of things one can [00:14:00] subscribe to. So we have various newsletters and other mailings that go out that will. Help somebody sort of absorb what we’re doing on a basis that’s easier to take than downloading the entire website. But certainly getting into what we’re doing and where we’re doing it is a way to get started.
Jacob: Fantastic. I applaud the efforts you’re doing and that you’re leveraging the power of storytelling to shift behavior and to move people towards more sustainable and healthy lifestyles. And I look forward to seeing the good that you continue to do and keep up the good work.
Bill: Jacob, I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me on
Jacob: Thank you.
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