Turning the ship around – adapting a long-term SBCC initiative to respond quickly to Covid-19.

Elena Colonna, PCI Media Mozambique

Covid-19 is forcing many communications organizations to adjust their Entertainment Education programs to address issues around the virus. Like many of you, PCI Media has been considering how to make best use of the assets we have, and the popular programming we already create with our partners.

In 2014, UNICEF Mozambique and PCI Media Impact began our collaboration to produce a radio-drama in Portuguese, an edutainment product to promote children’s and adolescents’ rights and well-being in the country. In 2015, broadcasting started on Radio Mozambique and community radio stations, with stories that address issues related to health, education, child protection and nutrition, among others. Since then Ouro Negro has become a very popular trans-media campaign based around the radio drama, re-purposing content in different formats (drama, live radio shows, theatre plays, etc.) and platforms (radio, television, social media, community theatre etc.), reaching different audiences, from young people to older, both rural and urban. The radio drama is now played on 116 stations every week, and 36 of the stations co-produce their own live call-in shows in 20 different local languages.

As with most complex drama series with many strands of messaging and levels of approval – Ouro Negro is written months in advance of broadcast – so when COVID-19 arose we wondered how we could respond. Fortunately, the many other formats are more flexible, so in discussion with UNICEF we came up with the following:

Special Covid-19 mini-drama series

A series of scenes were written and produced based on the popular characters from Ouro Negro, but focus on social distancing, prevention, hygiene, lockdown and more. We faced two big challenges. The first was getting rapid approval of the scripts and messages – which we did thanks to the long-standing partnerships and trust developed over many seasons. The second was producing the radio pieces while respecting the health and safety of the producers and actors. This involved recording voices one by one and disinfecting the various parts of the studio between each actor. Links to these audio pieces, uploaded to YouTube, can be found at the bottom.

Adapting the radio live show – the new Q&A programme

Ouro Negro ao Vivo – the live, local language call-in shows – have continued throughout the pandemic and usually focus on key issues within the drama episodes. In order not to break that flow, we essentially split the show into two parts – one where a health professional focuses on COVID-19 messaging and the other continues to address the long-running storylines and week’s issues. For the COVID-19 section we connected radio producers with local health personnel who answer listeners’ questions and concerns on air by phone. Our usual in-studio guests are also now taking part by phone.

Adapting the theatre – from community to radio

For some time, we have been adapting scenes from the Ouro Negro drama to highlight specific issues, and creating local language community theatre pieces from them. However, the middle of a pandemic is no time to bring together hundreds of people crowded around a village square to watch and enjoy a theatre show! While in lockdown, we have instead recorded the written theatre pieces for broadcast by our various radio partners. The pieces are produced in enough languages to reach large populations in the North, Centre and South of the country. Though there is no direct, live interaction with audiences which normally give the theatre shows their energy, audience feedback his achieved through calls and SMS to the radio partners, who can then respond live or by text.

Adapting the social media – balancing planned and emergency information

The programme’s popular Facebook page, with over 100,000 followers, has been beefed up with additional Ministry of Health-approved COVID messaging. We have emphasized the connection between existing drama stories and the pandemic, and have added links to all the audio pieces mentioned above. To keep the audiences informed about Covid-19 and entertained, we’ve adopted a strategy of separating our weekly posts between some dedicated to existing storylines from Ouro Negro, others dedicated to COVID issues, messages and questions. So far this mix of products seems to be reaching a large audience, which is accepting and understanding the COVID messaging well. Radio partner reports and Social Media response show that Ouro Negro is contributing to Mozambique’s very strong pandemic response so far – with a population of 31 million people there are currently only 115 confirmed cases and zero deaths.

For more information about PCI Media’s Ouro Negro programme in Mozambique, check the website or email Elena Colonna, Research and Messaging Manager