Health Promotion Through Entertainment Education - Emma Durden, Professor Keyan Tomaselli and Professor Lynn Dalrymple
 Ever wondered why Soul City is one of South Africa's most highly rated TV dramas? Or, what the relationship is between entertainment and education? Or whether people can actually change the way they think and live simply by watching television?
Find out more in the exciting postgraduate honours/masters module on Health Promotion Through Entertainment Education offered at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Durban).
Twenty years into the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and countless HIV/AIDS awareness programmes have failed to dramatically reduce the HIV infection rate, with prevention messages falling on deaf ears. To find out why, we turn to the theories of behaviour change that have been used by governments and organisations around the world. Research shows that the linear, rationally based psychosocial models popular in the Western world may not have as much impact as previously thought. A change in strategy is particularly relevant in an African context, where social conditions as well as cultural practices determine a very different way of viewing illness and health. Internationally, programme developers are turning to more contextually based socio-cultural models of behaviour change, that take the target audience as the starting point for the creation of messages and programmes. Modern development communication theories also point to the central role of the audience as active participants in the communication process, providing their own solutions to their own problems.
Entertainment-education (EE) is a communication strategy to disseminate information through the media. As applied in development communication, it was originally developed in Mexico in the mid-1970s and has been used in 75 countries, including India, Nigeria, the Philippines, Turkey, Gambia, and Pakistan. It has been developed in South Africa with special reference to health communication. Examples are the television series Soul City and the work of DramAidE in the field of participatory approaches to health communication. A basic premise is that educational messages are more likely to succeed if they set out to be entertaining.
The EE strategy is based upon the recognition that the most effective programmes and messages have form, content, character and unique features that can be analysed, understood and duplicated.
These theoretical discourses and strategies inform the popular new post-graduate programme offered by the University of KwaZulu-Natal's Centre for Culture, Communication and Media Studies. Now in its second year, the Entertainment Education for Public Health course has attracted students from a variety of different disciplines. Students in the 2003 class hail from Scandinavia, Eritrea, Rwanda, Malawi, Lesotho and different parts of South Africa. They include a selection of journalists, government public policy programmers, teachers, university lecturers and AIDS educators.
CCMS has partnered with three organisations in the creation of this course: the Johns Hopkins University Center for Communication Programs in the USA; South African based Centre for AIDS Development, Research and Evaluation (CADRE) and the KZN based NGO, DramAidE. Other contributors have included Soul City staff and a variety of international visiting professors, creating an excellent teaching team.
The course aims to engender a clear understanding of key theories of health promotion communication; of Entertainment Education (EE) interventions; and of how to apply theoretical understanding in the development of a framework for EE activities; as well as developing an ability to create criteria for research in the field of EE. The course has a strong practical component, with a focus on current local EE programmes, and funded research, which is project-based and designed to teach graduate students to work in the field with real benefit to local communities.
The partnerships forged between the mass media and production companies; government, health organisations, NGOs and the private sector are key to ensuring the continued success of these strategies. And courses like the one offered by CCMS go a long way towards developing a pool of individuals working in these sectors who are informed and experienced, and can apply critical thought to the practice of EE.
We are confident that as the current class of graduates return to their workplaces, strategy, policies and practice can only be improved, and that the expensive Sarafina 2-style failures to impart an intelligible message and improve the health of the nation, will be a thing of the past.
For further information on the EE course, please click here or email: [email protected] at the CCMS, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.
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