From:Essentials of Global Mental Health, edited by Samuel O. Okpaku, Cambridge University Press, 2014
Example 1.The Team: lessons from a social value soap dealing with a national trauma
The first example is an integratedmedia and social effort in Kenya employing a wide range ofmixed-media techniques and community involvement to assist with increasing national unity and healing a traumatized population after the 2007-08 ethnic violence. It is an exemplary effort of multiple forms of media embedded at the national and village levels, centered on a soap series, The Team, and a talk show, Fist to Five for Change. After the violence and during the production of the interventions a process of mutual learning took place both for the population in the use of social media and social gatherings and for the producers in the production of appropriate messages. The result was a noticeable contribution to national unity, political involvement, and social healing with the creation of positive social spin-offs still active to this day.
The Team is a Kenyan TV drama series that was co-produced by the Media Focus on Africa Foundation (MFoA), and The Search for Common Ground in response to the devastating violence in Kenya following the 2007 general election. As the post election violence shook the entire Kenyan nation in 2008, unity and reconciliation seemed like a distant dream and the future looked bleak. However, in the period immediately following the violence, the country began a process of healing and reunification that is still under way in which a media response played an important role. In concert with this process MFoA developed two television programs, The Team and Fist to Five for Change, which opened discussion related to the experienced trauma of the ethnic violence by encouraging social healing a national unity. The Teamis a drama series targeting all Kenyans, but particularly the youth, through afictional Kenyan soccer team designed as a metaphor for contemporary Kenyan society. They sought to use a multimedia strategy as a tool to promote discussion and understanding between people of different ethnic backgrounds with the immediate goal of preventing future violence through changing attitudes and promoting national unity.
Program content and approach
The series content depicts recognizable locations and daily life themes, often focusing on traumatic such as corruption, ethnic differences, coping with emotions, rape, and drugs. While The Team adopts many elements of the traditional telenovela model, it goes further by incorporating a social networking component to allow for audience participation; holding mobile screenings in conflict zones for largersocietal impact; and creating morally complex characters who must make decisions that do not always have clear "right" and "wrong" choices. The Team's use of the metaphor of a football team helped avoid paternalism and larger didactic statements by presenting situations in which characters must decide how to deal with conflict situations themselves. Audience members were not told which decisions to make, but were rather encouraged to evaluate decisions made by the show's characters and to think about what they would do in similar circumstances (Tully & Ekdale 2010).
The Team used an entertainment-education approach combined with social media, social networking, and offline interaction through facilitated screenings and discussion groups. Social networking sites, particularly Facebook and Twitter, as well as short message services (SMS), were incorporated into The Team's larger strategy, given the rapid growth of internet use in Kenya. A lively internet presence evolved, targeting different audiences with the different types of media and adapting the messaging strategy for each medium. This cross-media approach also included a radio program, large-scale mobile screenings, and distribution of DVDs for community screenings (Media Focus on Africa 2012). This approach reached thousands of people particularly the young, allowing for a two-way flow of information as opposed to the traditional one-way, top-down
message delivery to viewers, which is an often-criticized approach particularly in developing countries (Huesca 2003).
Mixed-media outreach and impact
First of all, The Team was watched or listened to. Standard media viewer ratings showed that viewer density overall was high, with 73% of the population watching 55% of the episodes and 24% having listened to at least 10 of the episodes. When the approach was connected to outreach mobile cinema units in eight severely affected areas of Kenya, extra benefit accrued, as episodes were re-shown in villages throughout the country. This was especially true when The Team was linked to the Fist to Five for Change talk show, which included a presence at the village level. This show was aired on national television during primetime to reach the largest possible audience. It was formatted as a focus-group talk show, in which afflicted citizens participated in confrontations and discussions. Fist Five is a consensus activity that allows people to showtheir agreement or disagreement with an opinion or statement. A fist (a zero) represents total disagreement, while a hand (a five) represents total agreement. One, two, three, and four fingers represent different levels of agreement. In this way, the facilitator would ask participants to show how they felt about issues raised by other participants. The show thus encouraged open dialogue by offering participants a safe space and method to discuss contentious and often unspoken issues. As The Team series began receiving national attention, the issues raised and discussed in Fist to Five proved therapeutic and highlighted emotions shared across the country (Tully & Ekdale 2010). In addition to the national broadcasts, a strategy of free mobile screenings and facilitated small-group workshops was developed to bring Fist to Five to communities with little access to television and to areas most deeply affected by the post-election violence. Having a chance not only to watch others engage in this process on the talk show, but actually to do it, provided an opportunity for healing and com munity reconciliation (Tully 2010).Overall, Fist to Five successfullyincorporated mass media and interpersonal communication at the broadcast and village level to create a useful strategy for coping with the post-election violence. The use of mobile community-based screenings and the facilitated workshops were arguably the most successful part of the program.
The overall impact of the intervention has been as diverse as the Kenyans themselves, leading to many ongoing spin-off activities across the country (Media Focus on Africa 2012). A public survey, developed to measure specific changes in citizens' awareness, knowledge, and attitudes in a diverse sample was carried out over the entirecountry. The Team contributed to positive changes on all three indicators for those who watched the dramas. Positive changes in citizen participation, ethnic understanding, improved skills, and facilitating action where found (Abdalla 2012). Regular viewers of The Team demonstrated significantly more positive attitudes compared to respondents who saw fewer episodes. Whether The Team directly contributed to initiating and shaping social attitudes and actions remains an open question, but reports from the field indicate its positive influence. Youth formed football teams across tribal lines, following The Team's model; a national commemoration day incorporated The Team model into its educational activities; community members formed reconciliation teams to help displaced citizensreturn back home; and in Nairobi, a governmental response, Kenya’s Ministry of Education incorporatedThe Team outreach model into the extracurricular activities of some government-run schools. Individuals testified to forsaking alcoholic lives, and others capable of doing so created “Peace” football, business and development clubs, to highlight only a few. All of and these directly linked the TV drama and its mobile outreach activities to their initiatives. Moreover, respondents mentioned their increased ability to collaborate and problem-solve around the themes dealt with in The Team. Many demonstrated a desire to improve tribal and local relations and experienced an increased level of knowledge and understanding of governance issues. In conclusion, The Team's success was dose-related, and its most powerful input was its community outreach activity.
The drama-soap and talk show broadcasts coupled to the outreach mobile screenings and social media presence were a success and contributed to increased social harmony and awareness in a significant part of a population that still describes itself as traumatically affected by the ethnic violence. It serves as an example of a remarkably successful mixed-media population-based intervention with demonstrated impact on the well-being and empowerment of a population under difficult circumstances.