Starting tomorrow, 13 December 2007, a national congress for development communication students will take place at the University of the Philippines in Los Banos. The theme of this year’s congress is “Emphasizing the role of development communication for a sustainable environment.” I’ve been invited to give a talk at the opening program tomorrow afternoon on “Environmental radio soap for rural Vietnam,” the DM2005-supported project that recently won the COM+ prize.

The radio soap opera is a communication platform to initiate new norms that favor reduced pesticide use and create awareness and promote favorable attitudes toward environmental sustainability among rice farmers in Vietnam.

The UN Millennium Project 2005 has classified radio, TV, video and compact disc as established ICTs while cell phone and the Internet fall under new ICTs. Radio and television have remained established ICTs in most rural communities in Asia. As early as the 1960s, Wilbur Schramm and Daniel Lerner (The Passing of Traditional Society) have reported a link between communication media and a country’s development. Thus, in countries with lower GNIs, the ICTs that have greater reach and impact might still remain the well established ones, like radio and TV.To meet the MDGs, radio will be important as it is low-cost, has extensive reach, the audience can listen to it while working or doing their chores as it is extremely portable.

With an estimated 300 million rice farmers, the challenge is how to reach them. Most of the world’s poorest farmers are in hard-to-reach environments, which limit their access to information that could increase their farm productivity. To reach millions, we used the radio soap opera format. Radio soap operas date back decades ago in many countries. Until today, The Archers remains as the longest-running agricultural radio drama in the UK.

In 2003, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, we developed a soap opera enriched with integrated pest management content using entertainment-education (E-E) principles and methodology. Both series were launched in July 2003. In Laos 104 episodes in 5 short stories were developed and were broadcast twice. In Vietnam 135 episodes of a series called Chuyen Que Minh (My Homeland Story) was on air from July 2004 to May 2006.

The project began with a stakeholders meeting, focus group discussions, audience analysis surveys and the information gathered were used to develop the soap opera characters, structure and storylines. The next step in the drama development process was to visit a typical family in the pilot areas. The team of technical experts and script writers visited the village together and developed a creative document describing the geography of the chosen farmer’s house and the family and neighbor relationships. Using the selected farm family as the guide, a character map for each drama was developed. The various characters were categorized into “positive”, “transitional” and “negative”, depending on their attitudes towards the educational issue, in this case IPM.

A typical “negative” character in this case might be a pesticide salesman and the typical “positive” character was the extension IPM specialist. The “transitional” characters might be those who were not aware of IPM, the dangers of pesticides and their attitudes can be modified. Usually the hero and heroine are placed in the “transitional” category and his/her change towards “positive” would help to highlight the educational issue. Relationships between characters were also established in the map. To incorporate IPM educational content into the soap operas we first established the script development team comprising of IPM specialists and creative writers.
The technical specialists had been nicknamed the “Turtles” and the creative writers, “Peacocks” and the main objective of these two groups is to communicate and create drama scripts with educational content integrated into the conversation.

To facilitate a continuous supply of technical content and ensure the scientific accuracy of the content, the “Turtles” developed the values grid and sent them to the “Peacocks” who would write them into the scripts. Drafts for each episode were then sent to the “Turtles” for quality checks before they were finalized, recorded and broadcast.

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