Where: Lusaka, Zambia
Area of work: Ending violence against women, Sexual and reproductive health, Engaging men and boys for gender equality
Population Media Center (PMC) started working in Zambia in 2018 as part of The Community Radio Program to Improve the Health of Women and Children. The three-year project was supported by USAID.
Using PMC’s unique Theory of Change, PMC-Zambia developed two popular radio shows — Kwishilya?(“Over the Horizon”) and? Si?alamba?(“Breaking the Barrier”) — each with 156 episodes and broadcast the long-running stories on strategically selected community and commercial radio stations across the five providences. The primary beneficiary audiences for the show were women and adolescents ages 15 to 49 years old. The secondary audience were men ages 15 to 59 years old. The broadcasts encouraged behavior change around important health and social issues in five Zambian provinces.
PMC established goals, objectives, and indicators for the shows, which were strategically connected to the thematic areas and written into the plotlines. To ascertain if the project objectives were attained, an outcome cross-sectional survey representative of the population of the five target provinces was conducted by local research firm BrandComm through mobile phones.
In addition to key programmatic indicators, the survey collected information on demographic factors and assessed different levels of exposure. Changes in knowledge, attitudes and behaviors on key program indicators as a result of exposure to the broadcasts were evaluated by comparing regular listeners to non-listeners. Multivariate logistic regression was used to control for influencing demographic factors that included sex, age, marital status, number of children, education, residence, region, and religion.
Regular listeners of ?Kwishilya? and? Si?alamba? were:
- 1.3 times more likely than non-listeners to discuss using prenatal services with their spouse in the last six months.
- 1.4 times more likely than non-listeners to know one of the benefits of exclusively feeding infants younger than six months old breastmilk.
- 1.2 times more likely than non-listeners to have taken action to advocate for girls’ education.
Photos provided by Population Media Center
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