Case Study 7: Malawi - Zimachitika (Such is Life)

The Story Workshop is a Malawian NGO, founded by American writer, educator and radio dramatist Pamela Brooke in 1996. SWET (Story Workshop Educational Trust) now produces three weekly radio programs, including Zimachitika, which went on air in 1997 and continues to date. It is a highly popular soap opera about rural development and food security, with little competition in terms of other soaps on Malawi radio.

Zimachitika began as a one-year safe motherhood and family health program for UNICEF. Added funders introduced new themes, such as women's political participation in elections, and a wide range of rural and health issues. It is set in the fictional village of Mbonekera and features the misadventures of Nabanda, the beautiful but cruel gossip, Gogo, the grandmother with many tales of personal survival and proverbial wisdom, Tadeyo's songs, Gubudu, the witch doctor and con man, and Zakeya, the young chief. The characters dramatize common barriers to social change and provide positive role models for overcoming them. Each episode is thirty minutes long.

The theme of each show is captured through a proverb (for example, "Spilt water can never be gathered") and often a song. Malawian cultural heritage is interwoven with new ideas in agriculture, environment, agroforestry, credit and household resource management, family health including HIV/AIDS prevention, gender equity and rural development self-help. A conflict and resolution format explores controversial issues and humanizes educational messages. Each episode ends with a cliffhanger.

The HIV/AIDS storyline focuses on barriers to positive behavior change. Some of these are misguided beliefs ("There is no such thing as AIDS." or "Sexually transmitted diseases can be avoided if the man urinates into the ground just after intercourse."). Other barriers are people in the community who "pull others down" and prevent developmental change. A recent HIV/AIDS storyline involves Zione, who is pressured into following the advice of local counselors to stay with her philandering husband, only to contract a succession of venereal diseases, and finally finds herself HIV positive.

The series itself has been forced into story changes due to deaths and illnesses among the cast, partly due to AIDS. Interestingly, SWET once refused sponsorship for an HIV/AIDS storyline from an international church-based organization, which wanted to prohibit condoms, even between married partners.

The Story Workshop's independence is paradoxically both its strength and its weakness. It has freedom to cover the issues it wishes, in its own fresh style, yet it lacks core funding or a head office to do research, evaluation design or donor relations, and it often struggles to meet deadlines and deliverables.

Management: SWET is based in Blantyre. The Managing Director/Producer is a Malawian with 20 years previous experience with the Malawian Broadcasting Corporation (MBC). An Internal Advisory Team made up of some of the key staff manages the drama by consensus. The overall management approach is not to compartmentalize research, writing, production, and program management, but to work from a rotational and multi-tasking basis so staff can cover for those who are ill or caring for the ill.

The project acknowledges some weaknesses in management, particularly in finance, administration and long-range planning. This is due partly to SWET being funded on a year-by-year basis by several different donors, each with different agendas and reporting and evaluation requirements, which cause bureaucratic delays. In addition, SWET has grown very quickly and project managers often find themselves "firefighting" in order to meet deadlines. SWET plans to work toward a long-term strategy and already has a two-year technical advisor for financial management, sponsored by Cordaid.

Staffing: There are two full-time staff members and about 30 part-timers, including the cast. The key posts are: Managing Director/Producer, Story Development/Project Adviser, two scriptwriters, Rural Development Program Manager, Communications and Marketing Manager, and Music Director. Music is performed by the Story Workshop Ensemble, and actors are professionals, paid per recording session. Independent volunteers from UK and USA help with graphics, the live theater component and evaluations. The project has had recurrent problems with actors who are poached by other groups, or who use their Zimachitika characters to convince audiences that they are collecting money on behalf of the series.

Writing and Production: In 1997 an initial workshop developed characters and settings, based on extensive field research, and then set out a values grid (influenced by PCI). Workshops are held regularly for advance storyline planning and character development, then a single writer does scenarios in English before the actual Chichewa script is written.

The project has its own digital studio and production office, and all production is done in-house. The producer manages the whole process, including cast, technicians and relations with MBC. Ideally, the series is produced in blocks of 13 episodes, but in reality it is usually only three weeks ahead of broadcast, due to organizational, operational and staff health issues.

Formative Research: A team of university students spent a year collecting local stories, oral traditions, cultural beliefs and personal experiences with social change conflicts. This was followed by "create and map a village" assignments allowing the researchers to create characters, setting, conflicts and profiles from the initial research, a process known as story development. The soap also builds on studies done by other organizations, such as the National AIDS Commission and on the field research done for SWET's other radio programs. All the field interaction has been recorded on audio or videocassettes and transcribed into English, funded by PCI. As such it is a valuable public archive of oral history and wisdom in Malawi.

Monitoring and Audience Feedback: After every episode of Zimachitika, a critique is held with Chichewa staff members. SWET conducts focus groups on selected episodes, runs national contests, and monitors audience letters. Over 10,000 letters were mailed in 2000, when listeners were invited to submit Malawian proverbs and stories from their home villages. Prizes were awarded and winning entries were used in the show. Most recently, SWET has set up a network of Listener Clubs and its own theater troupe, Story Workshop Action Theater. These outreach mechanisms also serve as vehicles for audience feedback. Live actors pick up audience response directly after performances and feed them back into the radio series, thus maintaining realism and immediacy.

Supporting Activities: The two sister programs are Tilitonse ('We Are Together'), another weekly soap, focusing on civic education in Malawi, and a farmer-to-farmer radio magazine program called Mwana Alirenji (Self-sufficiency). The three radio programs complement each other and build up overall project expertise and audience-connectedness.

SWET has also developed the following supporting educational activities: comic books for low-literacy audience in conjunction with the National AIDS Commission and others, village-based live theater performances, sales of cassettes of Zimachitika stories and songs performed by members of the cast, a weekly cartoon strip in the national newspaper, demonstration gardens showing new agricultural techniques in practice, and a quarterly newsletter. Additionally, SWET's scriptwriter has recently collaborated with PSI in writing a malaria campaign promoting the use of treated bed nets, which was broadcast on MBC and featured some of the most popular characters from Zimachitika.

Sustainability: A founding principle of Zimachitika is sustainability, however making the series self-sustaining financially could mean compromising content. Commercial sponsors would want product messages to air within drama programs, and SWET does not accept this. Thus SWET has deliberately chosen to rely solely on donor funding and has found more than enough clients who wish to tap into their direct link with the target audience. From small beginnings SWET is now a well-established NGO that owns its own building and digital studio.