SBCC Summit 2016 CommTalk: C'est La Vie!

“We should compete in the professional world and sell our content because we should be proud of them.” This CommTalk took place at the First International SBCC (Social and Behaviour Change Communication) Summit in February 2016 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The CommTalks at the Summit were 10-minute "TED Talk" like presentations that focused on experiences from the field, and presented an opportunity for organisations to share their innovations, successes, challenges, and lessons learned. In this recording of one of the CommTalks, Alexandre Rideau of Keewu Productions talks about the “C’est La Vie!” television series and the need to sell content instead of buying air time from broadcasters in order to remain sustainable and competitive.
Alexandre Rideau starts off his discussion by making the point that people working in the field of media for social change, such as edutainment-education (EE) producers, need to start looking at the sustainability of their work. With huge media offerings across a range of platforms increasing, there is a need to make content with socially relevant messages more visible.
One solution is to scale up, and with budget constraints faced by many EE producers, one way to do this is to sell content to the media instead of buying airtime from the media. He goes on to explain how they achieved this with the West African television production called C’est La Vie. C’est La Vie is a 26-episode television soap opera which tells the story of health workers at a health centre in a fictional city in Africa. The storylines convey messages on issues such as reproductive health, maternal health, child health, and gender-based violence. The series is based on EE best practices, which include formative research, support for writers, pretesting of the pilot, and monitoring and evaluation following broadcast to assess impact.
Rideau explains that the success of the series can be shown by the fact that the series was sold to two Pan African TV networks and 40 local TV stations. By getting TV stations to broadcast for free (instead of buying airtime), 25% of the overall budget was being paid for by television stations. The show subsequently received funding to be translated into English to be broadcast in East Africa and other African English-speaking countries. The scale of the programme also convinced the producers to expand to digital media. With support from the broadcasters, the episodes were then also made available online, and complemented by a social media campaign.
Rideau explains that the success of the initiative and their ability to convince television broadcasters to buy the show was made possible by a co-production approach that can be duplicated. This involved the NGO initiating the production of the series, RÈseau Africain de l'Education pour la SantÈ (RAES), creating a production company, Keewu Productions. This production company enabled them to speak the language of the media, and attract the necessary skills to create a competitive EE product that was at scale, high quality, and relevant - content that broadcasters would want to buy and broadcast for free.
He concludes by calling on other initiatives to take up the challenge and sell their content to broadcasters instead of buying airtime in order to support a thriving and competitive media environment for all television producers and the industry as a whole.