00:00 I will make the case that edutainment,
00:02 the use of entertainment media with development objectives,
00:06 can work wonders in improving attitudes and behaviors of audiences.
00:11 High quality edutainment requires investors
00:15 to work with professional storytellers,
00:17 those who know how to immerse audiences in engaging stories,
00:21 and through formative research
00:23 to adapt content for target audiences.
00:29 The world is facing multiple pandemics worldwide.
00:32 There are 1.5 million new HIV infections every year.
00:37 1 in 3 women have experienced sexual or physical violence in their lives.
00:42 1 in 20 of all deaths of youth are related to alcohol use.
00:48 These statistics are not that different for the US.
00:52 Entertainment media is part of the problem
00:54 by normalizing a lot of these bad behaviors.
00:58 But media can also be part of the solution.
01:01 For example,
01:02 there are more than 5 billion TV viewers.
01:05 Social media users spend an average of 2.5 hours on these platforms a day.
01:12 And through stories,
01:13 us humans make sense of the world,
01:16 so
01:17 can entertainment narratives positively shape beliefs,
01:21 attitudes and behaviors of global audiences?
01:25 Now,
01:26 good intentions may not be enough,
01:28 after all,
01:29 audiences may like
01:31 and follow more the bad guy of the story.
01:34 Like with any new vaccine or program,
01:37 programs need to be evaluated before they are scaled.
01:40 I will present evidence of randomized controlled trials
01:44 we are doing in the entertainment hubs of Nigeria,
01:46 India,
01:47 and Mexico.
01:48 These studies follow the same statistical logic of clinical trials
01:52 where to study the causal impact that can be fully attributed to a program
01:57 we randomize individuals to a treatment or a control group.
02:01 We partner with academics,
02:03 governments,
02:03 development agencies,
02:05 and the entertainment industry.
02:07 Our partners are Bollywood and Nollywood celebrities
02:10 and organizations like the USC Hollywood Health and Society Program
02:14 and the foundations of MTV Discovery and Facebook.
02:19 Let's start our global tour in Nigeria,
02:22 the country 2nd to South Africa,
02:24 with the greatest number of people living with HIV in the world.
02:28 We evaluated the 3rd season of the television drama MTV Shuga,
02:33 which in its 1st 2 seasons
02:35 had the Golden Globe winner actor Lupita Nyong'o.
02:38 The study was co-authored with the
02:40 Economics Nobel Prize Professor Abhijit Banerjee.
02:44 The show is broadcast in all sub-Saharan countries with
02:46 an audience of more than 700 million viewers.
02:50 Professional storytellers wrote these very engaging stories
02:54 like the story of Wicky,
02:55 a boy born with HIV who faces countless challenges in his life.
03:01 For our study,
03:02 we randomized groups to either watch suga or a placebo TV drama.
03:07 In addition to surveys,
03:08 we collected objective measures for HIV testing and chlamydia,
03:12 a sexually transmitted infection.
03:17 The 3 hour season had impressive impacts after 8 to 10 months.
03:22 The TV drama alone
03:25 doubled HIV testing,
03:27 reduced by 50% sexual concurrency,
03:29 reduced by 50% chlamydia.
03:32 The TV drama also substantially reduced sexual
03:35 and physical violence among suga viewers.
03:39 These effects were even larger for viewers who reported greater program immersion
03:44 and greater identification with characters,
03:47 mechanisms unique to high quality edutainment narratives.
03:52 The results of the MTV Sugar drama were not a fluke.
03:55 We conducted a meta-analysis
03:57 that combined 10 high-quality studies of entertainment narratives.
04:01 Half of the studies took place in the US
04:03 and the other half in 5 African countries.
04:06 The meta-analysis showed a decrease across multiple high-risk sexual behaviors.
04:13 But
04:13 can they detainment work in adverse settings
04:16 like in northern Nigeria where
04:18 Sharia law is the law of the land,
04:21 where over a third of girls are married before turning 15
04:25 and most children don't attend primary school
04:28 and those few who do
04:29 learn very little.
04:32 In northern Nigeria,
04:33 we tested the program My Better World,
04:36 which is used in schools but also
04:38 broadcasted on TV across multiple African countries.
04:41 The program,
04:42 which has won multiple awards,
04:45 contained inspirational documentaries like that of Fatima,
04:49 the first female pilot of Kano State in northern Nigeria,
04:53 and animations of stories to overcome
04:55 adverse social norms.
04:58 Now
04:58 aspirational stories alone may not be enough
05:02 to teach a child how to read,
05:04 so
05:05 one of our treatment arms provided a few families with another form of edutainment
05:09 gamified apps
05:11 that teach children to read
05:13 through learning by playing principles.
05:16 The combined movies and mobile intervention was delivered in 5 days
05:20 and targeted 6 to 9 year old children and their
05:23 parents
05:24 through community events.
05:27 After a year,
05:28 the intervention had massive impacts on learning,
05:32 around 0.50 standard deviations
05:34 for the target child
05:36 and their older siblings.
05:38 We see a decrease of 42% of children not attending school.
05:43 The increased aspirations also led in treated households
05:47 to a decrease in underage employment
05:49 and a decrease of teenage pregnancies.
05:52 The detainment ETEC intervention ranked 5th
05:56 out of 74 educational interventions
05:59 evaluated in developing countries,
06:01 not bad for a 5-day intervention.
06:04 Let's now move to India,
06:06 where 1 in 4 married women experienced violence in the last year.
06:12 Given how prevalent social media is in India,
06:15 we decided to evaluate an entertainment campaign delivered through Facebook
06:19 with the goal to reshape attitudes
06:21 towards gender norms and gender-based violence.
06:25 We tested a low dosage campaign,
06:27 a series of video clips that in total lasted 25 minutes
06:31 to mimic traditional social media consumption.
06:35 We evaluated two productions,
06:37 a TV drama translated as Court of Sex,
06:40 which takes place in a fake reality courtroom
06:43 where gender and reproductive health issues are often discussed in a humorous way.
06:49 And a documentary called We Evolve which aims
06:52 to raise awareness about gender-based violence in India.
06:55 After one week,
06:57 treated users were 2 times as likely to visit the UN W website
07:01 and spend 5 times more time on that website.
07:06 Treated users also became more progressive on their
07:08 attitudes related to gender and gender-based violence.
07:12 Most of these effects dissipated after 4 months,
07:16 highlighting the importance of reinforcers for low dosage campaigns.
07:20 However,
07:21 users that watched the documentary were 91%
07:25 more likely to add a banner against
07:27 gender-based violence in their Facebook profile picture,
07:31 a public display of their commitment against this pandemic.
07:35 Our final stop is in Mexico,
07:37 where we tested an interactive movie designed to prevent teenager addictions.
07:42 The movie is widely distributed in many movie
07:44 theaters and middle schools of the country.
07:47 Unlike other edutainment program programs we tested,
07:50 this movie's plot mostly takes place
07:52 in a very different setting in
07:54 in the US in this case,
07:56 and
07:57 the educational goal
07:59 of the movie was explicit.
08:02 Our Mexico study provides a cautionary tale
08:05 with results suggesting that the movie normalized bad behaviors.
08:10 While the movie increased knowledge about the risks of consuming drugs,
08:14 it also increased the consumption of alcohol and tobacco among middle schoolers,
08:20 especially among boys.
08:22 To conclude,
08:23 edutainment works wonders across multiple areas when done well,
08:27 high quality edutainment is achieved by working with professional storytellers
08:32 and
08:33 by adapting content to target audiences through formative research.
08:37 Innovative partnerships between the entertainment
08:39 and development sectors are much needed
08:42 to produce at scale high quality entertainment.
08:45 And finally,
08:47 good intentions are not enough.
08:49 Impact evaluations can help minimize adverse effects like we saw in Mexico
08:53 or maximize the effectiveness of edutainment
08:55 by testing different formats of complementary
08:58 interventions like we saw in Nigeria.
09:00 Thank you for your attention.
09:03 Thank you,
09:03 Victor.
09:03 Very,
09:04 very clear.
09:05 So
09:07 I draw at least two big lessons here.
09:09 One is the edutainment in fact can have transformative impacts.
09:15 We need to worry about content and dosage
09:18 and reinforcement of these messages,
09:21 but we can really achieve a lot through
09:23 uh the approach.
09:24 But also we need to be careful,
09:26 evaluate and make sure that the programming is actually
09:30 uh what we need for the purpose at hand.
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