Keywords

“Every man must have a son!” exclaims the domineering mother of Simba, as she attempts to pressure her grown son into enlarging his family of two. “You do not have an heir—you need to have a boy very soon. You only have girls at the moment!”

“But Mother, my girls are my children. They can become my heirs.”

“No, no!” says Mama Simba. “It is our tradition that every man must have a son.”

“Momma—things have changed, people have evolved.”

“No, culture is culture,” says Mama Simba. “I am not going to argue with you anymore. I have told you what must be done.”

So begins the tale of Simba, a key character in Sotakai (Footsteps), a 156-episode radio serial drama that aired in Uganda from October 2019 through January 2022. Over the course of many punctuated, melodramatic highs and lows woven throughout this story, Simba and his wife wrestle with decisions related to the uptake of modern family planning, the patriarchal urge for sons, and what their ideal family size truly is. Along the way, a diverse slate of tertiary characters tries to influence these decisions one way or another, employing unsolicited advice, emotional manipulation, or benevolent comradery—depending on whether they are cast as protagonists or antagonists to Simba and his family.

Created by Population Media Center, a global sustainability nonprofit and broadcast production partner based in the United States, Sotakai was designed to offer Ugandan listeners new information, alternative perspectives, and behavioral possibilities on a range of key human development issues. In addition to the family planning storyline, this radio drama also offered listeners facts and resources about nutrition, youth sexual reproductive health, and gender-based violence.

In terms of the climate connection central to this book, the family planning storyline is fundamental. The universal uptake of family planning along with improving girls’ education around the world are key components of humanity’s long-term efforts to achieve a sustainable living scenario with our planet and its climate. As the meticulous research of Project Drawdown has shown, the combination of improving girls’ education and increased global use of family planning constitutes the greatest single emission reductions strategy currently available to humanity: with the possibility of avoiding 85.4 gigatons of carbon dioxide between 2020 and 2050 (Project Drawdown, 2022).

Antecedent to these quantifiable climate benefits, however, family planning and girls’ education are stand-alone “must-haves” for realizing the full human rights of women and girls around the world. Family planning, one of the greatest public health achievements in human history, allows individuals and couples to anticipate and attain their desired number of children and the spacing and timing of their births. It protects the health of the mother and the outcome of each pregnancy. Family planning also allows parents the time and space to determine if they are able to care for more children, increasing the likelihood that any further children they have will be able to access health care, education, and other services.

In this light, the Population Media Center’s work around family planning:

  • Is in line with the Sustainable Development Goals, especially SDG targets 3.7 and 5.6.

  • Advances The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, specifically its call to meet the unmet needs in good quality family planning services and in contraception, and to increase knowledge and use of family planning and contraceptive methods—as well as increasing awareness among men of their responsibility in family planning and contraceptive methods and their use.

  • Advances the Family Planning 2030’s vision for change, including “Voluntary modern contraceptive use by everyone who wants it, achieved through individuals’ informed choice and agency.”

  • Is in line with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) motion titled “Importance for the conservation of nature of removing barriers to rights-based voluntary family planning.”

About Population Media Center

The Population Media Center is a mission-driven, 501 (c)–(3) charitable organization with headquarters in the United States. Creating life-changing, popular entertainment for a more sustainable world, the Population Media Center’s stories are rooted in a methodology originally designed by Miguel Sabido in Mexico during the 1970s. Sabido was a Vice President at Televisa, a powerhouse Mexican TV corporation, and one of the world’s largest producers of Spanish-language TV content. Sabido oversaw the creation of a series of telenovelas, or serial dramas, which were widely recognized as increasing social acceptance of family planning in Mexico (Singhal et al., 2013). Sabido’s methods were informed by Stanford psychologist Alfred Bandura, a globally recognized expert on the power of human role models in influencing individual behavior (Bandura, 2004).

William “Bill” Ryerson, the Population Media Center’s founder and President, had become aware of Sabido’s methods while working at the Population Institute in the 1970s. His colleague at the Population Institute, David Poindexter, was the Director of the Communication Center. Together, they promoted the use of radio and television entertainment programs informed by Sabido’s methods. In 1985, Poindexter founded Population Communications International in New York, and Ryerson soon joined the organization as executive vice president until 1998 when he established Population Media Center, with Poindexter serving as honorary chair of the board. Since then, Population Media Center’s radio, television, and Internet stories have aired in more than 50 countries around the world and are estimated to have reached more than 500 million people.

Global Fertility, Global Population, and Future Propensity for Greenhouse Gas Emissions

But how could family planning and girls’ education—uncontroversial, widely recognized social goods—also work so powerfully to avoid such a vast amount of future emissions? And how can a melodramatic, episodic radio show impact listeners’ behaviors? In this chapter, readers will learn how unrestricted access to family planning and universal girls’ education is instrumental in realizing the full human rights of women and girls around the world. Additionally, by destigmatizing voluntary family planning, correcting misinformation about the safety and efficacy of modern contraception, and strengthening social acceptance and support of girls’ education, the long arc of human population size is influenced toward a smaller, more sustainably scaled civilization in the future. This relatively smaller human presence on the planet scales down the basic human need for and propensity to emit greenhouse gas emissions in the future.

Family planning and girls’ education have well documented and widely understood influences on fertility or the average number of births per woman per lifetime. In terms of storytelling for the climate, the Population Media Center seeks to help global fertility or the average number of births per woman, per lifetime, decreases by at least 14% from its current level of 2.4 down to 2.1 or lower. A global fertility rate of 2.1 would, eventually, cause population growth to stop. Today’s fertility always affects tomorrow’s population dynamics.

Expert United Nations demographers currently project that the global population will increase from around eight billion today to 9.7 billion people by 2050—a 20% increase. By 2100, the projections calculate an increase of 10.8 billion—a 35% increase (United Nations, n.d.). These projections are built on expert assumptions about childbearing and human longevity trends. The most influential variable in these models is the total fertility rate. The good news is that by making immediate and transformative improvements in people’s lives today, history shows us that we can optimize the chances of population growth ending sooner rather than later. Indeed, Project Drawdown (2022) notes that “Slowing the momentum of human population growth in a way that upholds human rights is an important factor in slowing carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions.”

To be philosophically clear, the Population Media Center sees the greenhouse gas emissions emergency as nested within a larger and even more substantial problem: humanity’s overexploitation of the Earth. Also known as ecological overshoot, this is a quantifiable and measurable situation in which the Earth cannot regenerate the resources used by the world’s population each year or sufficiently absorb our wastes—including greenhouse gas emissions. The unfortunate reality is that humanity is well into ecological overshoot and has been for decades (Global Footprint Network, 2022). We can see the symptoms of this overshoot everywhere we look, from climate change to species extinctions and ocean acidification to poorly performing environmental health indicators. It all ties back to this collective overexploitation of Earth by humans.

The enormous size of humanity and its ongoing net growth—adding one million more people every 5 days in net growth (births minus deaths)—is one of many factors contributing to planetary overexploitation and is a serious obstacle to global sustainability. Population size and growth are not the only systemic strains and stresses on the Earth’s ability to provide for us while retaining its health and vibrancy, but they are strongly influential.

That is why they deserve the thoughtful attention of the most forward-looking people on the planet. At the Population Media Center, it is central to our mission. We aspire to be progressive, reverent toward nature and people, and creative. We do not try to “limit,” “control,” or otherwise manage the population. We operate on a completely different level: We weaken the many identifiable regressive forces that are known to keep fertility elevated. To make progress toward our goals, we focus primarily on destigmatizing voluntary family planning, correcting misinformation about the safety and efficacy of modern contraception, dismantling patriarchal opposition to contraception, and educating parents about the many health (ScienceDaily, 2016) and economic benefits of smaller families.

A Creative Solution for a Sustainable Planet: Population Media Center’s Advanced Storytelling for Climate-Related Outcomes

Humans have always told stories as a way to understand, share, and shift beliefs and actions. Since 1998, the Population Media Center’s award-winning, locally produced radio and video series—featuring relatable characters, familiar communities, and very real choices—have inspired planet-positive behavior change across 30+ languages, 50+ countries, and 500+ million lives. Combining behavior change theories, media industry insight, and character-driven, culturally relevant storylines, our transformative approach empowers by entertaining and inspiring.

The story of Simba was created, as all Population Media Center’s stories are, in partnership with in-country creative teams. It is critical, both operationally and philosophically, to recruit top local talent to manage the overall project, carry out the production of the dramas, and serve as scriptwriters and actors. We believe that the resultant local ownership of projects is vital to creating effective programming and contributing to lasting change.

While our dramas honor and advance the hallmarks of great episodic storytelling, such as captivating characters, cliffhangers, multiple/interwoven storylines, and unexpected plot twists, we go beyond mere entertainment and leverage key components of the fiction to promote and catalyze behavior change in audiences. Our expertise is in entertainment-education (EE), a sub-discipline of social and behavior change communication (Wang & Singhal, 2021a).

As EE practitioners, we create socially relevant dramas whose fictional settings accurately reflect the existing world of the audience. We then develop three types of characters in the story for each issue being addressed: positive, negative, and transitional, all from the audience’s point of view.

  1. 1.

    Positive characters are highly aspirational, to the point of being “larger than life.” Their behaviors, persona, statements, decisions, and general presence in the story are portrayed as almost ideal on the issue(s) we are addressing.

  2. 2.

    Negative characters are recognizable but untoward; though perhaps charming, gregarious, or attention-grabbing. Their behavior is ultimately revealed as dysfunctional relative to the issues we are addressing.

  3. 3.

    Transitional characters most closely represent the average people in the society. Like positive and negative character types, they speak and dress in familiar ways, live in familiar houses, and eat familiar foods. But they are uniquely designed to resonate strongly with the audience to such an extent that the audience forms emotional bonds with them, often to the point of love and affection, which in turn allows these fictional characters to be presented as the primary behavioral role models for the audience.

The positive and negative characters represent the extremes of behavior on one or more particular issues as practiced in the audience’s own community, while also serving as positive and negative role models for the transitional characters. The methodology portrays these transitional characters moving through a sequence of experiences:

  1. 1.

    They encounter a situation that requires or forces a decision on the part of the transitional character (e.g., “Life cannot continue as before”).

  2. 2.

    Both the positive and negative characters—purposefully designed to exhibit polarized and opposing values—make attempts to influence the transitional character’s decision such that it coincides with their own outlook and worldview.

  3. 3.

    The transitional character makes a decision, wholly and completely of their own accord.

  4. 4.

    The transitional character experiences a reward or punishment based on a good decision (aligned with the positive character and values being promoted) or a bad decision (aligned with the negative character and the values being discouraged).

This dramatic mini-cycle is presented to the audiences repeatedly as the larger drama unfolds—yet with increasingly “higher stakes” for the transitional character (i.e., more dramatic situations and decisions that have increasingly profound and consequential impacts on the fate of the transitional character).

Eventually, the dramatic tension built by these decisions is resolved with a climactic occurrence in the story that results in the transitional character being changed. Importantly, having developed resiliency and self-efficacy through repeated decision-making and experiencing the consequences, the transitional character is able to maintain the new behavior—even in the face of temptation to revert—and becomes an advocate for the newly adopted behavior.

Meanwhile, the negative character is ultimately punished, specifically due to their negative actions and attempted influence on the transitional character, cueing the audience that the negative character’s values and behaviors on the issue are indeed negative.

The positive character is ultimately rewarded for their positive actions and influence on the transitional character, cueing to the audience that the positive character’s values and behaviors on the issue are positive.

As audience members listen or watch the transitional character experience this sequence of events, spread over successive episodes, their emotional ties and identification with the transitional character sparks an emotive, psychological desire to adopt similar values and actions in their real life. Simultaneously, as they follow the transitional character successfully navigating the challenge of repeated decision-making and the resulting consequences, the audience gains a vicarious experience of self-efficacy in implementing change.

Our dramas always employ multiple interweaving plot lines, a characteristic that multiplies the power of our core behavior change convention in several ways. First, it allows for a staggered presentation of experiential sequences for multiple transitional characters in the drama: meaning that at any given time, at least one plot line portrays dramatic changes of fortune to a major character. This complexity of plotting plays into audience retention and loyalty, as the audience must remain attentive to each episode of the program to determine what the resolution of the current “cliffhanger.” Likewise, in the interim between episodes, cliffhangers encourage the audience to self-reflection about what might happen in the story and what they hope will happen. This stirs interpersonal communication among the audience and other community members: talking about the issues, as a matter of course, as they discuss the story. Finally, multiple storylines also enhance the pure entertainment value of the serial, helping to deliver large, dedicated audiences and distinguishing our product from many other strategies.

Beyond the individual episodes of the drama, the Population Media Center also regularly employs epilogues, designed to reiterate, and enhances the audience’s exposure to the story’s content. Unlike a public service announcement, epilogues are generally short, nonfiction spots broadcast at the end of a show episode. Generally, around 30 s in duration, epilogues convey helpful real-world information to the audience, such as the locations of family planning clinics.

Progression of Simba and the Impact of Stories Alike

As the Sotakai radio drama unfolds, Simba continues to wrestle with the influences of his mother, a purposefully designed negative character. In addition to her worries about Simba having a male heir, Mama Simba also exaggerates the potential negative health side effects of contraception. She says uptake of family planning methods will breed promiscuity and that Simba’s wife will give birth to deformed children if she decides to have more.

While these concerns may seem oversimplified or even tawdry, they reflect many myths, misconceptions, and social norms prevalent in Uganda and in large swaths of the developing world. For example, a study conducted in three African countries found that 62% of female respondents in Kenya thought contraceptives could result in deformed babies. Over 55% of women surveyed in that country suggested contraceptives could cause cancer (Gueye et al., 2015). A study in Pakistan found that women are often dissuaded from using contraception because of the belief that God’s will determine fertility or that family-planning decisions should be made solely by husbands (Agha, 2010).

At the Population Media Center, we consider these and similar informational obstacles as regressive—forces that affect an unfair informational and social ecosystem that works against men, women, and families as they deliberate whether family planning is a choice that is right for them. When looking at global maps of contraceptive prevalence and fertility, it is easy to see where these unfair and unjust systems are most at work: sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia. In many countries in these geographies, contraceptive prevalence is below 30%, while the global average is around 57% and many high-income countries are above 70% (United Nations, n.d.). Meanwhile, fertility rates in low-income countries are often 80–100% or more above the global average of 2.4.

Simba, and the hundreds of thousands of Ugandan listeners to Sotakai, also get the perspectives of several positive characters as the story unfolds. He hears from friends who say parents should not pressure their children for more grandchildren but should support their children in making informed personal decisions. He is told by another sympathetic character that family planning side effects are rare, understood, and manageable.

After several tests of his mettle and other travails, including a brief discontinuation of family planning (and a resultant and ill-fated pregnancy that threatens the life of Simba’s wife), the couple opts to keep their family as is and no longer worry about having a son. Once this decision is made, good things happen for Simba and he and his family live the proverbial “happily ever after” life.

While the end line program evaluation of Sotakai (Footsteps) is still in progress at the time of this writing, we are confident in our chances of positively influenced listeners in Uganda based on our previous projects in the region on family planning.

For example, in Rwanda, which borders Uganda to the south, we produced Umurage Urukwiye (Rwanda’s Brighter Future), a 312-episode radio show, which aired from October 2012 through October 2014. End line research found that the likelihood of respondents saying they “currently use something to delay or avoid pregnancy” was 1.6 times greater compared to baseline. Moreover:

  • Listeners were 1.6 times more likely than nonlisteners to say they talked to their spouse or partner “once or twice” or “more often” about family planning in the last 3 months.

  • Listeners were 1.5 times more likely than nonlisteners to want three or fewer children.

  • Listeners were 2.1 times more likely than nonlisteners to know of a place to get a female condom.

The Population Media Center also produced Pambazuko (New Dawn) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This 156-episode show originally aired from February 2016 to August 2017 and was rebroadcast from 2018 to 2019.

  • Listeners were 2.4 times more likely than nonlisteners to say “Yes” when asked “In general, do you approve of family planning?”

  • Listeners were 1.8 times more likely than nonlisteners to say that their ideal family size is three children or fewer.

  • Listeners were 2 times more likely than nonlisteners to say “Yes” when asked “Do you think you will use a contraceptive method to delay or avoid pregnancy in the next six months?”

  • Listeners were 3.2 times more likely than nonlisteners to say that girls should be encouraged to pursue their education to a high level.

  • Listeners were 2.1 times more likely than nonlisteners to say they strongly agree with the statement “Investing in a girl’s education benefits the entire family.”

  • Listeners were 1.9 times more likely than nonlisteners to say that they strongly agree with the statement “Girls should have equal opportunity in education as boys.”

Improved Lives Today, Intergenerational Results Tomorrow

Although there is a lack of consensus over the precise weight and significance of the various interactions among educational attainment, contraceptive use, and fertility outcomes, it is clear that these complementary interventions are important [to future population dynamics] and emissions reductions.—Project Drawdown

There is urgent work to be done around the many failings of human attitudes, knowledge, and behaviors related to protecting Earth’s resources—their use and misuse, distribution, and mal-distribution. Today, far too many outcomes of human enterprise related to resource extraction and use result in unjust, lopsided outcomes among human beings. Just as many are ecologically uninformed, careless, or simply contemptuous. Decades of profligate greenhouse gas emissions by rich nations, even as the impending and likely dire impacts were understood all along (McGreal, 2021), attest to an unspeakably selfish engagement with the natural world.

A person in the United States consumes 5 times as many resources as a person in Uganda (Global Footprint Network, 2022). CO2 emissions per capita in Uganda are equivalent to 0.13 tons per person—compared to 15.5 tons per person in the United States. If the whole world adopted the material lifestyle of an average American citizen, the planet could only sustainably support 1.5 billion people. Yet, our global population is going to hit eight billion sometime early in the year 2023.

In this light, it is critical to understand that long-term, intergenerational work to slow down and stop population growth—at the global scale—cannot and should not be expected to pay immediate and substantial demographic dividends. We may improve individual lives immediately, but demography does not turn on a dime. Working on population, including the Population Media Center’s battle with unfair and unjust information ecosystems around family planning, is certainly not a priority action for near-term mitigation of the greenhouse gas emissions emergency. The emissions crisis must be forcefully addressed and largely solved far before the 30 or 40 years of hard work it will likely take to see population growth come to an end. Moreover, it must be remembered that at least 2.5 billion of the nearly eight billion people on Earth desperately need more material resources to escape poverty and achieve minimally acceptable living standards (IFC, 2009). Until relatively clean, renewable energy is deployed at scale, it is almost certain that poverty reduction will require an increase in local greenhouse gas emissions (Wilkinson, 2017). Yet, we are already in an ecological overshoot and a full-blown climate emergency.

Hence, circling back to the beginning, we see population is one component factoring into humanity’s overall overexploitation of the planet. We have reached millions of people with liberating information, alternative perspectives, and newfound confidence to enact meaningful change in their own lives around family planning. Indeed, the history of EE provides reasons for great hope. For example, the telenovela programs produced by Miguel Sabido in Mexico between 1977 and 1986 that spoke about family planning are widely credited with helping the national population growth rate decline by 34% during that time (Wang & Singhal, 2021b). And, as the UN Environment Programme pointed out in their 2019 report (Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services), slowing expansion of human habitation and human farming is the most critical need for stopping the loss of biodiversity (“the web if life”) that makes the planet habitable. Further, deforestation is also a major climate change factor.

Looking forward –– beyond having helped so many people achieve near-term victories in their personal lives –– we have undoubtedly, in our patient and persevering way, bent the long arc of human population size toward a smaller, more ecologically right-sized number of human beings in the future. Ours is long-term work to help give the people and creatures of the late twenty-first century and early twenty-second century the best possible chance to overcome the numerous ecological, climate, and social challenges they will undoubtedly face.

Honoring the dignity of women and children through family planning is not about governments forcing the birth rate down (or up, through natalist policies). Nor is it about those in rich countries, where emissions are highest, telling people elsewhere to stop having children. When family planning focuses on health-care provision and meeting women’s expressed needs, empowerment, equality, and well-being are the result; the benefits to the planet are side effects.—Project Drawdown