Keywords

The theme song will stick in your head for days. That was intentional.

Verse

Verse How do we hear? How do we see? What makes up the air we breathe? How does a plane fly over the sea? Why do the planets float so weightlessly?

Verse

Verse Let’s Go, Let’s Know! It’s Technology! Let’s Go, Let’s Grow! Science You and Me! Let’s Go, Let’s Know! We’re Learning Every Day! Let’s Go, Let’s Grow! N*Gen Leads The Way!

So begins another episode of N*Gen (pronounced “engine”) or Next Generation Television, Sub-Saharan Africa‘s first science TV show for kids and a nominee for the 2023 Peabody Award.

First developed with teachers and children’s media experts in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic and filmed across Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, South Africa, Uganda and Zambia, the show’s initial goals were to elevate girls and women, increase trust in science and scientists, present COVID-19 prevention in an engaging and memorable way, and to help give people the critical thinking tools to fight misinformation. As the program found an audience and the COVID-19 crisis shifted increasingly from pandemic to endemic status, so too did the program’s focus. N*Gen pivoted to engage more meaningfully with the climate crisis, exploring a range of topics like ocean conservation, ecosystem change, zoology, misinformation/myth-busting, zoonotic disease, and human–wildlife interactions. It also shifted its frame from one rooted in teacher-centered learning toward one that portrayed scientists and children as protagonists in a more narrative and field-based format.

This pivot to climate issues is a response to practical considerations. Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most vulnerable regions in the world to the increasing impacts of the climate crisis, with rising temperatures, drought, changing rainfall patterns, and other manifestations of climate variability set to collide with traditional livelihoods largely dependent on family farming (Chikava, 2021; Fleshman, 2012). With a median age of 19 years old, Sub-Saharan Africa is also home to the largest youth population in the world. This population represents not only the future of this region but of the broader world as climate crisis-induced population shifts to increase the footprint and influence of the African diaspora. Though largely overlooked by other advocacy and entertainment-education climate change campaigns, how the young population of Sub-Saharan Africa understands science, nature, and their relationship to these fields can have incredible impacts moving forward.

This chapter will explore the practicalities of producing and distributing this science-based entertainment-education television program aimed at youth. Beyond this case study, this chapter details aspects of the broader media landscape in Sub-Saharan Africa, existing science education efforts, and considerations related to the strategic use of entertainment-education to cultivate consciousness and action related to the climate crisis. The authors maintain that the era of climate crisis-based entertainment-education interventions is only just beginning and that this project will prove to be an early attempt to use the powerful method of entertainment-education at scale and across contexts. Furthermore, engaging with diverse, marginalized, and/or subaltern audiences can help form a bottom-up movement to push for more effective political policies and scientific innovations.

Using Entertainment-Education to Promote Science

Astronaut Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman to go into space, cited the racial and ethnic diversity of the cast of the television show Star Trek and, in particular, African-American actress Nichelle Nichols’ portrayal of Lieutenant Uhura as an early inspiration for her ambition to pursue a career as an astronaut (CNN, 2005). Having turned fiction into reality and become a media figure herself, Jemison then became a real-life inspiration to others. For instance, the first African-American woman to earn a doctorate in electrical engineering from New York University, Ruthie Lyle-Cannon, cited Jemison’s example as her inspiration to pursue electrical engineering when she was 15 years old (Duke University, 2013).

In her study of entertainment’s role in shaping the consciousness of future scientists, O’Keeffe (2010) interviewed dozens of professional scientists and science students. She found that they often became interested in the sciences at an early age and cited specific examples from the media as inspirations for their interest. These mediated figures can provide powerful impressions on populations that might lack access to examples of real-life scientists.

This is particularly true for under-represented populations, who look to media, whether fiction or nonfiction, to seek out stereotype-defying, aspirational characters with whom they can identify. The sense of wonder and possibility these figures provide can become a basis for forming professional aspirations and behavioral intentions of their own. Greenberg (1988) frames this as the “drench hypothesis” wherein “striking, new images can make a difference…[and] cause substantial changes in beliefs, perceptions, or expectations about a group or role” (pp. 100–101). He contrasts the power of this “drench” of powerful examples with the slow drip of media effects in Gerbner’s Cultivation Theory (1998), which posits that media’s impact is the cumulative result of exposure to large amounts of media over a long period of time.

While entertainment has the power to inspire, whether by drip or by drench, it often does so unintentionally or in an undisciplined manner. In contrast, entertainment-education (EE) combines the power of entertainment’s inspirational potential with education’s intention. Though definitions abound, Wang and Singhal (2009) formulate EE as “a theory-based communication strategy for purposefully embedding educational and social issues in the creation, production, processing, and dissemination process of an entertainment program, in order to achieve desired individual, community, institutional, and societal changes among the intended media user populations” (pp. 272–273).

EE has been used to shift the needle of knowledge, attitude, and/or behavior on a broad array of topics (Frank & Falzone, 2021; Singhal et al., 2013), including family planning (Ryerson & Negussie, 2004, 2021), the prevention of cardiovascular diseases (Bouman, 2021), violence against women (Green et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2018), gender inequality (Wang & Singhal, 2021; Chatterjee et al., 2021), child marriage (Obregon et al., 2021), religious tolerance (Gowland et al., 2021), and many other topics.

Much of the literature on EE has focused on fictional formats, particularly dramas, often through the centering of the Sabido Methodology of entertainment-education (Sabido, 2021). But fiction is often rooted in reality, and nonfiction may be far more constructed than the viewer realizes. The documentary is often considered the epitome of nonfiction storytelling (Borum Chattoo, 2020), but it is useful to remember that while establishing his “First Principles of Documentary,” John Grierson situated nonfiction film in the tenuous place between truth and fiction, where the author could reshape the world according to her whim and through her ability to make and share stories: “Here we pass from the plain (or fancy) descriptions of natural material, to arrangements, rearrangement, and creative shapings of it” (Grierson & Hardy, 1966, p.146).

The line between fiction and nonfiction is less important for the audience than one might think. This is partly because one of the central aspects of a powerful narrative is the ability of a story to “transport” the audience into the worlds of the story. Green suggests that “transportation can happen whether a story is about actual events (such as a documentary) or whether it is the creation of an author’s imagination” (Green, 2021, p. 88). Increased transportation increases audience members’ likelihood to adopt story-consistent beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors, so the format matters less while the intention of the storyteller and the transportation of the audience member matter more.

Educational television aimed at youth is a perfect example of a format that blends fiction and nonfiction to transport impressionable audiences into narratives that can shape norms at an important time in their development. Indeed, for more than a half-century, evidence has demonstrated that educational television such as Sesame Street can play a profound role in children’s cognitive development (see Fisch et al., 1999; Guernsey, 2013; Mares et al., 2013). From Sesame Street to television shows by Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson, this medium has been used to teach, inspire, and cultivate knowledge across multiple generations of American children. There is every reason to believe that as we look for ways to address the climate crisis, entertainment-education aimed at youth can be particularly effective, both for the primary audience of children and for the adults in their lives.

We saw the opportunity to test a theory—that high-quality, educational television inspired in part by the type of programming created by PBS in the United States could be produced affordably and collaboratively in Africa and distributed for free at scale across multiple commercial markets in Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond, reaching a mass audience. If the project were to draw a significant audience, we anticipated that donors and large NGOs and bilateral institutions would recognize the potential of this approach and begin to fund and/or develop their own projects in this mode. To see why the moment for such a project has come, we must explore trends in media and science education in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Sub-Saharan Screens

Television occupies an unusual place in the hierarchy of development media in Sub-Saharan Africa. For the technological enthusiasts (many of whom might not have significant experience working in the field in Sub-Saharan Africa), their attention will be on the bleeding edge of technologies like artificial intelligence, blockchain, virtual reality, and other digital tools. But across Sub-Saharan Africa, only 29% of individuals use the Internet (World Bank, 2018) with mobile Internet adoption standing at 26% at the end of 2019 (GSMA, 2020). Technological enthusiasts elevate tools that are not always appropriate in a context that finds the bulk of its population further and further isolated by a burgeoning digital divide. For them, television will constitute an old medium.

For those with deep experience in developing media, their attention will still be on the radio, which has consistently enjoyed a place of primacy in this field, particularly in the sphere of entertainment-education, where Sabido-style radio drama and themed talk shows are the default setting for social and behavior change media campaigns. This population may critique television for requiring reliable access to electricity, while radios can run off battery power or hand cranking in some models. For them, television will be too advanced a medium.

But this misses the reality of the increasingly prominent role that television is playing in Sub-Saharan Africa, where television is the fastest-growing legacy medium (Cerbone, 2018). This is largely a function of access to electricity. Though electrification remains a limited resource, it is growing. The World Bank (2021) estimates electrification at 46% of households in 2019 across Sub-Saharan Africa. This is up from 26% in 2000. This growth is a combination of slowly increasing access to grid-tied power and exponentially increasing access to microsolar. For reasons including improved technology, supply chains, and financing schemes, microsolar has expanded rapidly in recent years in Sub-Saharan Africa, allowing previously unpowered communities to leapfrog from no-power directly to off-grid decentralized power. This leads to an “energy ladder” in which these households acquire basic and then more advanced modes of energy and tools of technology, starting with a basic LED light or phone charger and moving toward television (Dominguez et al., 2021). There were nearly 55.34 million TV households in the region in 2015, a number which was expected to rise to almost 75 million by 2021 (Statista, n.d.). According to a different estimate (Dataxis, 2019), among the 215 million households in the Sub-Saharan African region, around 102 million had access to television in 2018. Whatever the exact number may be, the reality is that a previously disconnected population has increasing access to global media. The screens in these newly electrified homes will quickly become a window into a broader world. Whether the stories they receive through that window hurt or help is, in part, dependent on those of us in the business of creating and distributing EE.

Meanwhile, broadcasters are in a difficult position. Audiences clamor for locally produced and salient content, but broadcasters cannot meet this demand with the budgets they are working with. This presents an enormous opportunity for entertainment-education. While historical television stations have demanded that NGOs pay them to play media (often documentary and other didactic content), well-produced entertainment-education creators can sidestep this by offering these gatekeepers content that their audiences want to watch. Organizations such as Impact[ed] (formerly known as the Discovery Learning Alliance), Ubongo, MTV Staying Alive Foundation, and others have been utilizing pro bono or low-cost licensing arrangements with terrestrial broadcasters to amplify their work. By providing their content free of charge to broadcasters, a symbiotic relationship has emerged. This also becomes a measure by which all televisual entertainment-education projects in Sub-Saharan Africa should be judged moving forward: can the producer create something good enough that the broadcasters would acquire and air it with no other incentive other than that they believed they could monetize it on their own? If so, then EE is doing its job. If not, the project has failed to focus on the first E: Entertainment.

We must also note the role that language plays in the growth of television. While radio is often broadcast in local languages, television is generally broadcast in the dominant lingua franca, most often English, French, Kiswahili, or Portuguese. This is because radio stations often have a smaller geographic footprint for their broadcast signal, so local language is essential to compete in a relatively small and fragmented market. Television stations, in contrast, are fewer and often have a much larger broadcast footprint. So, broadcasting in local languages makes less economic and technological sense. For instance, in Uganda, there are more than 40 local languages and dialects. A social and behavior change campaign that utilizes audio will often pick 4–6 of these to translate content into. But of the most watched television stations, all, but one, broadcast primarily in English. Development media veterans will often dismiss television as a medium because of this language aspect. There is no question that information obtained in one’s primary language enhances learning and comprehension. But the tradeoff for a creator of entertainment-education where language is concerned is always between breadth and depth. Where cost is a limitation (and when is it not?) and multiple-country distributions are a goal, television offers an opportunity for scale that simply cannot be matched by radio.

Science Education

There is global awareness of the need to enhance Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) learning from early years through to post-secondary through education and public engagement. Its importance lies in the very need to create more scientifically literate and engaged citizenship. As the InterAcademy Partnership (IAP) states in its Health Policy position (Ortolani, 2021), “To prosper in this modern age of innovation requires the capacity to grasp the essentials of diverse problems, to recognize meaningful patterns, to retrieve and apply relevant knowledge.”

What should this learning look like in practice? Science education should enhance curiosity, wonder, and questioning. It should capitalize on young minds’ natural, innate curiosity, giving them a sense of adventure. It should be immersive, inclusive, enabling, and encouraging. There should be a vast opportunity for personal experience, making connections that extend ideas, inquiry, and curiosity while providing experiences that motivate further engagement and learning. It should be a self-propelling, self-sustaining process that results in a snowballing of ideas and connections with learners’ reality and community (Rieckmann, 2022). Science learners should be continually creating, communicating, constructing, connecting, concluding, contradicting, collaborating, conferring, creating, and communicating all over again. The science classroom should be a space for explosive ideas, creativity, communication, curiosity, wonder, expression, and of course IMAGINATION. It should be a place that sparks curiosity, keeps learners hooked, and harbors inquisitiveness. A space where the learners are doing, experiencing, exploiting, evaluating, and dissecting. An ideal science education should allow students to interact with and learn from science in an authentic, purposeful way rather than by the simple acceptance of abstract theorem. Science education would also benefit from working with the big ideas: Climate Care, Conservation, Habitat Protection, and more.

However, the teaching of science has not changed in line with the technical advances of the twenty-first century. There is very little evidence within the educational programs of the presentation of big ideas of science from which classroom-wide conversations can arise (Harlen, 2010). Science learning has not changed over the generations irrespective of technological advances and worldwide engagement and discussion on many novel scientific phenomena from the applications of nanotechnology in medicine, to the spontaneous formation of mutant variants of disease-causing viruses, to the implementation of RNA vaccine technology in disease prevention, to name but a few recent examples.

This stems from the origins of the teacher’s own experience of science education and the long-held belief in the complexity of scientific concepts and phenomena. Often, the method by which teachers prepare scientific content mirrors how they learned about science. Traditional science teaching has demanded an absolute commitment to memorizing many facts, formulae, and abstract theories. Science education is still dominated by rote learning, memorization, and teacher-led lessons that concentrate on repeating keywords or phrases, peppered with closed questions that do not have room for exploring facts and expanding ideas and theory. Didactic presentation of scientific theory robs the learner of the experience or curiosity, of the interconnectedness of science with their immediate environment. It is not a subject area for the fainthearted and cannot be appreciated within the realm of relevant learning that immediately applies to community issues: the community in which the young aspiring African scientist lives.

Successful science education everywhere relies entirely on the nature of its presentation and/or delivery. Successful science education across most of the education structures within the continent of Africa requires an active, dynamic, and continuous overhaul of the teacher development process in a manner that appreciates and recognizes the necessity to inject relevance, storytelling, meaning, and importance into science learning. It is in this context that the N*Gen project was formed.

Creating the First Pan African Science Show

With hubs in Tanzania, Uganda, and the United States, Peripheral Vision International is a nonprofit organization that has worked with dozens of other nonprofit organizations to co-create and distribute EE and social and behavior change communication to some of the most remote regions in the developing world. Since 2011, Peripheral Vision International’s varied output includes music video programming, television shows that blend journalism and hip hop (Shaker et al., 2019), public service announcements, interactive mobile audio games (Frank et al., 2021), short films, documentary, e-comics, radio shows, and other media that have reached millions of audience members across borders and platforms.

There is a growing awareness of the power and impact of media on a population’s knowledge, beliefs, and behavior and a growing understanding that media and communication are what connect, bind, and potentially divide us. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it quickly became clear that we were also in the midst of what the World Health Organization called an “infodemic” related to rampant misinformation, conjecture, rumor, and conspiracies (WHO, 2021). To approach the infodemic by creating programming aimed at youth made the most sense for several reasons. Children’s beliefs are still taking shape, so it would be an opportunity to shape norms rather than reshape established norms around gender and science. With schools closed and children stuck at home under mandatory lockdown in many places, this audience was more accessible than ever. Because lower-income households in Sub-Saharan Africa have access to fewer screens than higher-income households (Dataxis, 2019), there is a large secondary co-viewing audience of parents and elders. While imported content abounded, there was relatively little youth content produced for or featuring African youth—so this would be an opportunity to provide representation for the largest youth audience in the world to see people like themselves on screen, many for the first time.

When the idea to create N*Gen came about in 2020, we wanted the show to focus on science at the very basic, primary school level. We chose the topics for the 13 episodes that comprised the first season advised by educators from around the continent. Most of the teachers working with national curricula deemed science to be an area both neglected by the Sub-Saharan African education systems and one that could transcend boundaries and apply to an abundance of cultures and experiences that our young viewers across Africa would represent.

In this first season topics included the human body (brain, senses), the natural world (bees, wetlands), matter and motion (light, energy). With each one of these topics we emphasized the relevance of science and its ubiquity in everyday life. Science is not an abstract, theoretical, and incomprehensible concept attempting to take form as a medley of symbols on a faded blackboard. Science happens in your kitchen, in your backyard, and when you are sleeping.

A modular format of various small segments (“snackable” for online streaming) emerged that combined to create a half-hour program. The core segments were lessons delivered by teachers and TV presenters. Mainly filmed against a green screen, these were animated with images, B-roll footage, animations, and other lively visuals to bring the lessons to life. They were enhanced by including experiments that kids can do in and around their homes. Interspersed between these lessons were other segments. “Health Tips” were public service announcements on topics like nutrition and masking to prevent COVID-19 transmission. Because children were stuck at home with little physical activity, each episode also featured an exercise routine featuring a lively Tanzanian dancer/exercise instructor named Tadhi. Teachers from across Africa also contributed short videos of themselves giving lessons that we animated and included as the “Africa Teacher Challenge.” Social emotional learning and mindfulness were also given a segment in the form of a “Brain Break”—a visualization or mediation exercise aimed at promoting mental health and well-being. Each episode concluded with a “Brain Booster” that tested knowledge acquired over the show.

First launched in September 2020, the reception for N*Gen went far beyond our wildest expectations (see an example in Fig. 1). Broadcasters across Africa have shown that their audiences are hungry for engaging, educational, youth-oriented content. The 13 episodes in series 1 were syndicated to 50+ TV networks across Africa through both terrestrial and satellite broadcasts. Though available only in English (because of budgets), broadcasters in Ethiopia and Nigeria translated it into local languages at their own expense.

Fig. 1
A photograph depicts a group of people observing medical professionals at work in a laboratory setting. Four individuals are in the foreground, observing the activities inside the room through a glass partition. Inside the room, two professionals dressed in protective clothing and head covers.

Adiva, Penzi, and Liam watch with awe as researchers at the Uganda Virus Research Institute handle large quantities of the covid-sars-2 virus, in order to create vaccines. (“To make a vaccine, you have to get something that looks like a virus, and nothing looks like a virus better than the virus itself. So we are multiplying it here, getting good quantities, so that we can use it later to make a vaccine, to protect people from COVID.”—Dr. Jennifer Serwanga, Senior Immunologist.) (Photo credit: James Mbiri)

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We also found that there was an appetite in Western countries for the show and N*Gen became the first program to platform African scientists and educators to a Western audience. It was broadcast in the United States/Caribbean on The Africa Channel, on Common Sense Media’s streaming service Sensical, to the African diaspora through the streaming platform AfroLandTV and became available to over 50 million students and 5 million educators across 90 countries via Discovery Education, which is in half the classrooms in the United States. N*Gen quickly became the 27th most popular channel among over 650 available channels within Discovery Education in the United States.

But while it was possible to count platforms, the question remained: how many people had actually seen the program? Measuring viewers/television ratings in Sub-Saharan Africa is notoriously difficult due to the large number of national markets and the expense of collecting reliable data. The pandemic has only aggravated this information deficit, with top regional ratings research agencies like Geopoll partially or totally suspending operations in many of the markets that they previously serviced.

But the data we were able to collect was very positive. One snapshot comes from Kenya, where our broadcast partners, Akili Kids TV collected granular data from October 10, 2020, to May 9, 2021, and estimated child viewership at 36,068,045 total views and adult viewership at 34,439,994 total views over the length of the airing of Season 1 (with a combined total of 70,508,039). There were between 600,000–800,000 children and an additional 600,000–800,000 adults watching each episode, depending on the day of the week and time of airing. Unlike US broadcasts, where viewership is very segregated across ages, the high degree of co-viewing between children and adults reinforces the potential of television in Sub-Saharan Africa to transcend these demographics, and that therefore it is more effective to aim younger rather than older when developing EE that can reach a mass audience. These numbers allow us to estimate that across dozens of other broadcasters, each episode of the program would have been seen by at least 10 million unique viewers and very likely many more than that.

Shifting to Focus on the Climate Crisis

Television stations clamored for more episodes, and PVI was able to cobble together the budget to produce an additional 13-episode season. Focus group testing in Nigeria with teachers, parents and school children, and broader user feedback led us to shift the format, and the burgeoning climate crises led us to shift the focus.

The research is beginning to show the role that entertainment-education can play in promoting climate-related content. Flora et al. (2014) found measurable changes in high school youths’ knowledge, beliefs, involvement, and behavior related to climate science after exposure to an in-school live presentation that they describe as entertainment-education. In testing different frames around climate communication, Jones (2014) found that narrative structures increased the effect of participants toward hero characters, which in turn indirectly influences the persuasiveness of a story. Topp et al. (2019) demonstrated that entertainment-education increased cognitive engagement with climate-related content. Lawson et al. (2019) demonstrated that child-to-parent learning in a US context was capable of boosting climate change concerns in parents. These results were strongest in males and conservative parents who previously displayed the lowest levels of climate concern. Interestingly, daughters seemed incredibly influential in effecting this change. We saw the opportunity to build on this with N*Gen.

One of N*Gen’s core purposes was also to disrupt gender stereotypes in Africa and beyond. Highlighting the work of female scientists and educators in Africa is an opportunity to inspire millions of children, and girls in particular, as well as their parents to let them know that they are smart, they have value, and they are capable of greatness. We determined that Season 2 would better achieve this by presenting actual African women scientists in their professional settings and engaging directly with topics related not only to their area of specialization but to their career path and how they achieved what they have professionally.

In Season 2 of the show, we also decided to center our lenses on human impacts on our environment, including but not limited to climate change, and ways to mitigate it (see an example in Fig. 2). But how to tell such a large story to primary school children on a continent where conversation about climate change has been largely restricted to esoteric conversations at policy level?

Fig. 2
A photograph of 3 individuals wearing life jackets on a boat. One of them is identified as Linet Kiteresi, a marine pollution expert.

Linet Kiteresi from the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute (KMFRI) in Mombasa, Kenya, explains the devastating impacts ocean water pollution on various ecosystems and human health (“Ms. Linet, what do scientists like you do at KMFRI?”—Yana). (Photo credit: Ayaz Rajput)

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De Meyer et al. (2020) propose that too much of the coverage of the climate crisis is negative in tone. They suggest that a more effective frame would be to move from issue to action, focusing on the stories of people positively acting to prevent climate change. They point out that rather than knowledge/belief leading to action, it is more effective for action to lead to belief, and that the ideal frame “places ‘people taking action’ at the heart of each story, fact based or fictional, and regardless of level of interactivity or media format” (p. 10). By providing viewers with this mediated sense of agency, they will look for ways to take action in their own lives. This is also consistent with concepts of “positive deviance,” where the focus shifts away from normalizing community problems and toward amplifying problem-solving individuals and practices that may deviate from the social norm in productive ways (Singhal et al., 2013).

The televisual medium allows us to realize this potential to create agency by depicting relatable on-screen personalities taking action. Rather than teach in the traditional sense, N*Gen strives to inspire and encourage to inquire, explore, and discover. We decided to initiate conversations about climate change, and other aspects of humans’ attitudes and behaviors concerning our planet, by putting children face to face with African scientists and activists in the same settings they are learning about.

Season 2 is for the most part not topic-driven but hero-driven, moving our point of focus from the studio to the field. We researched and selected charismatic science experts from Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, and Nigeria, where we have a strong production network, as spokespersons for our message. Dr. Perpetra Akite, an entomologist at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda; Dr. Fiona Wanjiku Moejes, a marine biologist at the Mawazo Institute in Watamu, Kenya; and a Professor of African Architecture and Urban Design, Nmadili Okwumabua in Lagos, Nigeria, are just a few amazing professionals who take the children on adventures to discover the world they live in and interact with. We developed episode briefs, preliminary scripts, and production plans around them.

In one episode, Lorraine (11), Alexis (8), Nimaro (8), and Judah (7) meet Dr. Perpetra Akite at her office at the Zoology Department of Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda (Fig. 3). Dr. Akite ticks some of the boxes of a “typical scientist”: she is wearing a white lab coat and has a microscope, and a stack of papers on her somewhat disordered desk. Yet she defies the stereotype of a distant, unsociable scientist. She greets the kids with a warm smile, which throughout the episode hardly leaves her face, welcomes them to her lab, and in the first minute of the interaction ignites the kids’ curiosity:

  • Kids: Good morning.

  • Dr. Akite: Welcome to the zoology department.

  • Lorraine: Dr. Akite, what exactly is your job?

  • Dr. Akite: I am an entomologist.

  • Kids: Entomologist?

  • Judah: What is that exactly?

  • Dr. Akite: An entomologist is somebody who studies insects. We study how they behave. We study their numbers. We study the different kinds of insects that are there. We study how they affect us.

  • Alexis: Why do we study insects?

  • Dr. Akite: Insects are very important to us. In fact, without insects, we would not be there. Let me show you around.

Fig. 3
A photograph of a group of children and a professional gathered around a table examining a collection of specimens laid out for observation.

Dr. Perpetra Akite, an Entomologist at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, shows four insect-curious kids around her lab. (“Butterflies which are in this box, (…) each of them has a name. An entomologist like myself, we study and even name them.”—Dr. Akite.) (Photo credit: James Mbiri)

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Dr Akite leads the kids through the maze of glass cabinets, where thousands of specimens are displayed. She opens a case with butterflies from the Papilio family. Each butterfly has a tag with its scientific name and the date it was collected. The kids laugh at the name “Papilio jacksoni.”

  • Judah: Is it Michael Jackson?

  • Dr. Akite: No. But it was named after someone called Jackson. Entomologists, like myself, we study and even name them.

When, later in the episode, the kids ask Dr. Akite how they could become an entomologist like her, Dr. Akite once again refers to the naming of new species, to further excite the young learners in science:

  • Dr. Akite: So, your first interest has to be just looking around you because when you look around you, you’ll always find an insect. And there’s a high chance that you will actually discover a new species someday, and it can also be named after you. For example, I have a moth. It is a little moth. It is now named after me. They used my family name. From Akite, they name it Akitei. Lorraine, if we got a new species of insect and we wanted to name it after you…

  • Lorraine: A locroach.

  • Dr. Akite: That must be a new species of cockroach.

  • Lorraine: Yeah.

  • Dr. Akite: You now become part of science. Your name remains there.

When Dr. Akite opens another glass case and carefully pulls out a bright orange butterfly, larger than her palm, the kids exclaim a genuine “wow.”

  • Dr. Akite: Here is the biggest African butterfly that we have. It is called the giant African swallowtail. In the 1960s it actually used to occur not far away from Makerere here, but now that butterfly is not there anymore. Do you think you would know why?

  • Lorraine: Why?

  • Dr. Akite: Because humans have broken up the forest, and it is a butterfly that needs a very big continuous forest. We say it has gone locally extinct because the forests are so small, they can no longer keep this butterfly.

  • Judah: If there are no forests in Uganda, what will the butterflies do?

  • Dr. Akite: If there are no forests in Uganda, all the butterflies that need forest to survive, they will all die. But do you know what will be the biggest problem of that?

  • All: What?

  • Dr. Akite: Insects are very important in pollinating the food crops that we eat. So when they also die, then we are going to have problems as well.

She’s captured their attention and their concern. The kids ask her to take them to the forest to learn more about how it’s changed. In the forest, Dr. Akite comes up with a game: an insect scavenger hunt. The kids, equipped with insect nets, run off into the woods excited to find their little treasures. One by one, they bring what they find, and Dr. Akite names the insects and tells their characteristics, once in a while adding a wow-fact, that further excites the kids about their adventure and builds their respect and awe for insects:

  • Dr. Akite: You know that butterflies also go very long distances, just like planes. Did you know that? For example, we have butterflies that travel from Europe to Africa. Yes, they look so fragile and small but they have a lot of energy”

She also has an endearing and humorous way of talking about insects in a way that parallels some of the human behaviors that children can relate to:

  • Dr. Akite: So, (the egg) hatches into a caterpillar, which starts to feed. (...) When it goes into a cocoon, it doesn’t eat anymore. Do we also kind of go into cocoons sometimes? At night, we don’t want to eat anymore. We sleep. But when we wake up in the morning, we’re like caterpillars. We just want breakfast!

The scavenger hunt goes on for hours, the kids enjoy their time in the forest and Dr. Perpetra’s teachings. But before they head home, Nimaro voices his concern, which Dr. Perpetra uses as an opportunity to once again emphasize the direct link between human activities and environmental changes:

  • Nimaro: But some insects are harmful, like the mosquitoes that carry malaria, the locusts that attack crops in Northern Uganda and many other insects.

  • Dr. Akite: They are part of the big ecosystem. The reason why they have now become a problem to us is because we have gone and destroyed nature. We have gone and built our houses in the swamps where the mosquitoes used to breed. Now they come and breed in our houses. We have gone and taken away some parts of forests, so the insects that live in forests now seem like they’re living in our houses. But if we give them a chance to live in their areas, in their habitat, what I call their home, then we would have no problem with them. Do you remember this big butterfly that we saw in the lab, the bright orange butterfly? It was here in Mpanga about 1966, and now we are here in 2021. This butterfly doesn’t occur here anymore. We have cut down the forest. The butterflies and other insects are telling us about what we are doing wrong or what we are doing right in the environment. We need all these insects in order for us to survive.

  • Nimaro: If the insects die, will we also die too?

  • Dr. Akite: Actually, yes. Now the scientists are very sure.

  • Lorraine: What can we do to protect insects?

  • Dr. Akite: The best way of saving the insects is to protect their habitat, just like we protect our homes. To protect insects, it needs all of us. It needs…?

  • Kids: All of us.

The real heroes are the children who set off on the journeys to meet the experts, engage in their research and advocacy activities, and shower them with questions. Dr. Akite sends a group of young explorers on an insect scavenger hunt into the buzzing and bustling, yet dwindling Mpanga Forest. Dr. Wanjiku Moejes takes them on a snorkeling safari to a vibrant but fragile coral reef in the Indian Ocean, Professor Okwumabua walks them through a sustainably built house in Nigeria’s Delta State to see how it is constructed and the value it brings to its inhabitants and the environment (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4
A photograph of a group of people snorkeling underwater, exploring the clear green waters. There are small fish in the background.

Sisters Xamara and Yanna explore the underwater world, guided by marine biologist, Dr. Fiona Wanjiku Moejes off the coast of Kilifi, Kenya. (“And what is the best way to learn about the ocean? It’s to get in it!”—Dr Fiona.) (Photo credit: Azim A. Mula)

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Finding our child- and science-heroes was one of the most important steps in the pre-production process. Because of the gender component of the show, we wanted the featured experts to be predominantly female. We had looked for them via social media, various online networking platforms, and news outlets. When we would approach scientific institutions, many would render our inquiries impossible with bureaucratic requirements, such as multiple permissions from top officials, who (always male) would stall the process. Many were plain unresponsive. At the time of development, N*Gen was still an unknown brand with no prominent names attached to it, and not everyone we approached was willing to work with us.

Once we cast the experts, it was time to cast the kids. We did this via schools and educators we collaborated with. The contenders presented a science experiment of their choice, had to talk about one place in the world they wished to travel to, ask one question about a caterpillar, and were invited to touch a cardboard cutout caterpillar. One interesting realization from the casting was that the children who were the best performers at school did not always perform well in front of the camera. Those who performed best were often the kids labeled by their teachers as naughty and underperformers. But they were the ones who asked the most interesting questions, and who dared touch the caterpillar (although it was made out of benign cardboard, most kids were scared to do so!).

Filming with the selected kids and experts in the field was certainly the highlight of the process. In order to generate content for the 13 episodes of Season 2, we spent close to 50 days in the field: in the forests, farms, factories, beaches, oceans, lakes, laboratories, weather stations, schools, national parks, polluted cities, and unspoiled villages. We quickly realized that although the kids were very sensitive to matters concerning our environment, animals, plants, and the planet as a whole, the concept of climate change was not an easy one to get across. Even the featured experts were falling short of explaining it in a succinct, convincing, and—most importantly—child-friendly manner. The filming process required a lot of coaching and second, third, and umpteenth camera takes. As always, the kids would surprise us, and amuse us, with the most unexpected explanations.

In the “Forests” episode filmed in the Fort Portal region in Western Uganda, 8-year-old Elena makes a claim that “trees give us oxygen and we give them farts” when trying to explain the carbon cycle. Harriet Nakyesa, a reforestation expert, gives Elena and her friends Jessica, Jacksa, and Elton, a more scientifically accurate explanation, and shows them how to measure the amount of carbon a tree can store. She introduces the term “carbon sequestration” and lets each child take a turn to wrap measuring tape around the trunk (Fig. 5).

  • Harriet: So, when you’re measuring the carbon of the tree, you look at the diameter and the crown of the tree. Can you look up on the top of the tree? You read here. Seventy-three.

  • Elena (voice over): Scientists created a special formula to measure how much good a tree is doing. Lots of calculations, you see? And the result is...

  • Harriet: This tree is storing 1386 kilograms of carbon.

  • Kids: Is that a lot?

  • Harriet: Yeah, it is a lot, so it has cleaned the environment. So it is a very good tree because it has stored a lot of carbon.

  • Kids: Thank you, tree.

Fig. 5
A photograph depicts a group of four children engaged in a conversation while sitting and standing on a mossy rock amidst greenery.

The lead child hero of the Forests episode, Elena, wonders at a piece of “life (which) started from a rock,” as forestry expert Mary Ekyaligonza explains the principle of succession. Kyaninga Forest, Uganda. (“Succession means one generation of plants is being replaced by another when the other one dies. Life starts from a rock. From a rock to the lichens. From lichens to the ferns. From the ferns to the weeds. Then the weeds to the tree.”—Dr Mary.) (Photo credit: James Mbiri)

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Mary Ekyaligonza, who is another forestry scientist accompanying the kids on this adventure, reminds them of the negative human impact on the environment, and how that in turn affects us:

  • Mary: Most of these big trees, which are important to us and clean up the environment to give us all the good services that we need, are disappearing.

  • Elena: People are cutting them down to make tables and chairs?

  • Mary: Yes. So every time the population is growing, you find we demand a lot of forest products, so we cut down the trees. We lose the trees. And in future, you will find a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the earth will not be good for us to live…When the carbon dioxide is a lot in the atmosphere, it can cause what we call heating. I don’t know if you’ve heard about climate change.

  • Elena: I have. It’s very dangerous and that humans are causing it.

Yet climate change proves to be a hard notion to both comprehend and explain in simple yet convincing terms. When contextualizing the documentary-style field footage in our later scripted and recorded studio segments, we therefore make sure to focus on something other than terminology, graphs, and cycles. Instead, we explain the interconnectedness of things, evoking feelings of responsibility and empathy. We ensure the narrative draws a clear line between our actions today and our survival as a species tomorrow.

“I have been around for much longer than anything else. I am going to be around for much longer. I’d like you to be here as well. I’m stepping in to make sure you humans don’t spoil my plans. So listen up,” says Earth Auntie, an animated character of the anthropomorphic planet Earth in the closing episode of the season, titled “Sustainable Living” (see an example in Fig. 6).

Fig. 6
A photograph depicts two individuals standing beside a cartoonish, animated bottle. They are set against a whimsical background adorned with various line drawings of everyday objects and symbols.

N*Gen Season 2 hosts Nnena and Jiji are joined by a special guest, Ms. Plastic Bottle in the Plastics episode. (“I’m going to need some clever human beings to help me be part of the solution rather than just being the problem. Who’s prepared to help me?”—asks Ms. Plastic Bottle.) (Photo credit: June Ndinya)

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The children we filmed seemed most responsive to this framing and approach, and our hope is that the ones in front of the TV screens will also be moved, and subsequently motivated to ask questions, to initiate conversations, and—eventually—to be the next generation of African change makers.

Conclusion

It should not be the responsibility of entertainment-education to play a significant role in averting a climate crisis. It should be the responsibility of lawmakers and diplomats who create the policies that govern the industries and corporations that despoil our planet. But we do not live in the world of should. It is an unfortunate truth that public opinion is far more likely to shape policy than the reverse. Just as we saw in the battle for civil rights, for gender equality, for marriage equality, and in many other areas, public opinion frequently evolves more quickly than the laws that follow. The soft power of the media often leads and shapes the cultural shift that ultimately results in the hard power of legislation.

Reflecting on the relatively weak agreements that emerged from the COP26 climate summit, US Senator Kristin Gillibrand (WNYC, 2021) stated in an interview: “There is an interest. There is a growing demand. The fact that we have young people all across our country and across the globe who are demanding answers, who are furious with lack of commitment, who are never going to stop and never going to give up. That’s going to push politicians to be bolder, to be more aggressive, to work outside their governments, to go farther than their governments are asking.”

The need to act on climate change has never been more important. Thus, for actual, effective climate policy, it is necessary that we inform, persuade, and organize a vast citizenry to demand change. Only then can the very real work of policymaking be done. So, for better or for worse, entertainment-education can and must be a part of this approach.

Youth in the same regions where the climate crisis will hit the hardest can and must also be central to the movement. With a median age under 20, the largest youth population in the world is in Africa. The potential of this population is enormous. They are the future not only of the continent but also of the planet. But historically, they have been missing from their own media and the broader discussion around the climate crisis. Meanwhile, Western broadcasters, educators, and mission-driven media platforms are beginning to wake up to the need to include more diverse voices from the global south. This creates an opportunity for entertainment-education to play a pivotal role in platforming powerful voices from within their own communities to cultivate climate consciousness at scale. The N*Gen project—one among what we hope to be a growing cohort of efforts—is trying in its small way to help cultivate that movement.