Interview with Puntos de Encuentro and Soul City

The Communication Initiative (CI): Why don't we start with each of you telling us about the main strategies your organisations use to reach your audiences and the kinds of audiences that you are reaching.

Soul City/Sue Goldstein (SC/SG): We try to reach as many people as we possibly can but also try to find ways to reach people who are difficult to reach using normal mass media. We use television, radio and different channels in a multi-media strategy. The idea is that if we don't reach people through television we reach them through radio. Given that people are getting more than one media we may reach them more than once and this helps with understanding. We also try to get as big an audience as possible which means getting onto prime time. To do this we use drama, radio and TV and make it as good a drama as is locally available. Using this strategy we've reached a large audience with a very big overlap of people who watch television and listen to radio. We use the popularity of the electronic media especially TV and radio. We have developed a brand that attracts audiences. This gives us a rounded overall strategy.

CI: What kinds of audiences are you trying to reach?

SC/SG: Our biggest audiences are young people aged 15 – 24. We reach mainly urban audiences. We reach 79% of our target audiences, which are black and coloured South Africans. The South African political perspective is about reaching people who were previously disadvantaged through the education system of apartheid and that's why we initially targeted black and coloured. So, we reach 79% of those people through different media and large numbers of our audience are young. We reach 68% of our rural audience, and we reach 50% of people who are illiterate. If you look at and compare statistics with other programmes there is a very high reach to difficult to reach people.

CI: Could you tell us a little bit about the kinds of messages and issues that you're dealing with?

SC/SG: We try to deal with a variety of different issues and we've set criteria for the issues we deal with. Some of these are that it has to be a national issue and an issue that can be dealt with through the media. There must be coalitions and groups of NGOs and people acting on the ground that can support the electronic media and there needs to be a reasonable amount of consensus among key stakeholders on whether it's an important issue or not.

The kinds of issues we have dealt with in the past are: AIDS from many different perspectives such as prevention, care and support of people, orphans, men's responsibility and youth sexuality. We've also dealt with violence against women, violence in general, alcohol, tobacco, and in our next series we will be dealing with depression and asthma. So we try to cover a broad range of health issues, but also issues that are not always seen as health issues. For example, small business development, personal finance, how to save, how to budget, electricity or use of energy in the home, land and houses, things that are usually peripherally seen as health related, but we see as broadly related to holistic health.

So, our message about development is that it is broad and extensive. We spend at least 18 months developing each series - going through research with target audiences, and key stakeholders and then consensus building with stakeholders for what the message needs to be and finally pre-testing of the material.

CI: Do the coalitions of NGOs and other groups that you are working with change depending on the kinds of issues you are dealing with?

SC/SG: We work with different groups of people at different times. Some are more ongoing than others. For example, with the children series, we have children rights groups that we work with continuously. With some of the groups we only work with on one series. Many of the AIDS groups we've worked with for years.

Puntos de Encuentro/Amy Bank (PE/AB): How many episodes is a series?

SC/SG: We only do 13 TV episodes so it's quite a small series actually. For the adults it's 13 one-hour episodes and for children it's 26 half hour episodes. With radio, for adults it's 60 -15 minute episodes but they're daily, and for children it's 26 half hour episodes in a magazine programme format.

CI: And Puntos? The question again is to talk about the strategic approach that Puntos takes, the media it uses, how these relate together, your target audiences, and the issues you deal with.

PE/AB: Our strategy evolved in a different way than Soul City. We were doing other kinds of social change communication work on women's and youth issues. We had a magazine, a radio show and we had done public awareness/public education campaigns - TV and radio spots, posters, bumper stickers, all those kinds of things. We had also done youth leadership training on diversity with equity issues and on the issues of discrimination and the intersecting discriminations and oppressions - unlearning oppression was the key construct.

We decided in 1996 to do a TV show – called Sexto Sentido (Sixth Sense) - precisely to reach people that we hadn't been able to reach before in the other things and because we felt that we needed to increase our coverage. We thought at that point that we needed, as we called it in our strategic plan, 'an ideological counter-offensive' to the kind of conservative backlash we saw coming. We thought that the only way to do that was to get on television. We were specifically interested in promoting a kind of alternative youth culture that could counterbalance the mainstream discourse.

The target audience definitely was youth. It wasn't until after we began to work on the television show that saw that we could combine things into a multi-media and community mobilisation strategy. It sounds very neat and integrated now but it was not originally conceived that way. Our main virtue was being smart enough to take advantage of the opportunities we discovered and make it work together but it's not like we had it figured out before hand.

Puntos de Encuentro/Ana Criquillion (PE/AC): At first we thought of it simply as a kind of scaling up, a bigger and bigger audience and then we thought about how to connect all our work together.

PE/AB: Our magazine "La Boletina" started out in 1991 as 500 mimeographed copies and now we have 26,000 distributed through a volunteer network with a circulation of about 150,000 (2 studies have said that an average of 6 people read each issue). The radio show was originally on the University radio station and now it's on one of the main FM commercial radio stations. We've always started out small and then grown. We also began to analyse how much we were spending on campaigns that lasted 3 months with one minute TV spots and that we could get a lot more mileage – bang for our buck - from something that could have a more permanent presence on TV.

But the idea was definitely to get to the grassroots and the public in general. The magazine focused almost exclusively on people who were already in organisations or who had some connection to a local organisation. We thought it was important to get to other people who are not in organisations and who have no place to get this kind of information anywhere else.

Our target audience is young people but we know that in most households there are a lot of people watching the same television at any one time and that we have a tremendous secondary audience of children and adults and old people. Our highest rating is among 13 – 17 year olds according to both the commercial ratings and our own survey. Next is 18-24 year olds, and it also turns out we have a big women's audience of all ages.

We've only been on the air for 9 months: 36 half-hour weekly episodes. We'd love to get re-runs, but the station has an unofficial policy against them.

SC/SG: Isn't this expensive? Wouldn't it be cheaper to use reruns?

PE/AB: You'd think so, but just about everything on TV here is imported - U.S. series, Brazilian soap operas, whatever - and the TV stations buy programming packages.

CI: So, in a sense they're running nothing but reruns?

PE/AB: Yes, they're running nothing but reruns which aren't reruns for Nicaraguan television. The Nicaraguan broadcast business has its own logic, which is quite different than in other places, like the U.S. or even South Africa, I guess.

Getting back to how this all came together, it became a "strategy" when we realised that doing a TV show was like making a huge gourmet meal and your guests eat it in 15 minutes and it's all over and you've spent so much time and energy to make it and bam it's done. We thought that would be a shame and that you can't really expect social change to come about in a half-hour a week and if you miss it, too bad...so we thought: we could have the radio show - it's not a drama, it's a daily youth talk radio show - deal with all the issues that are brought up that week on TV. Since Sexto Sentido has 6 main characters we have the onerous task of having 4-6 story lines in each episode. This means there's a ton of stuff to talk about. With a continuing story like domestic violence you can talk about the issues of whose "fault" it is this week; next week, about whether that's just the way it is in families; the following week, about what you can do about it; the week after that, do parents have the right to hit kids as an educational corrective measure or not, and so on. There's a million nuances to each issue so you can talk about them every day on the radio. One day it'll be alcoholism, one day it will be something else, but one thing for sure, every week there's sex, at least one programme a week has to do with sex.

Many of the calls that come into the radio show resonate with a story from the television show - it stimulates dialogue. You can use the story to start a debate but it's not essential for people to have seen the television show to know what's happening on the radio show. We do this as a way to get more public debate going, and to give people a chance to "answer back" to what's going in Sexto Sentido.

We also make resource packages with video cassettes containing 4 half hour episodes along with discussion guides. The reason that we do half hour shows is because we couldn't fathom the work and cost of producing an hour television show. And since we were originally going to do comedy in a sit-com format our script writers got trained in half hour drama and doing an hour is a whole other thing.

So we do 4 episodes per cassette. Our youth training team takes each episode and thinks through the key themes that kids could relate to that provoke a question or experience they could identify with. So for example, they might put in a question like "With what happened with Elena this week, do you think that it's also your fault if you get hit?" The point being, of course, to get a discussion going about how violence is NEVER justified and is certainly not the fault of the person getting hit, despite what the person who hits you says. These kinds of questions go into the discussion guides that go with the cassettes.

Then we do a youth leadership training camp every year. It started way before the TV show but all of our cast went as participants and then as facilitators at the youth training camp so a lot of these youth leaders now personally know the stars of this show. That's a kind of a great thing and we use it in the training manual.

CI: Can you tell us a bit about the training manual?

PE/AB: The training manual... When you ask about the issues we deal with, at least in the first year of programming we chose the issues that basically have to do with what we call "diversity with equity", human rights in a daily context. We also decided that because we didn't know if we'd get a second year, if we'd ever get another chance, we at least had to deal with abortion and homosexuality - the hardest and most controversial stuff you can deal with in Nicaragua. So in addition to those two issues, the main issues we've dealt with have to do with "adultism" and youth identity: relationships with parents, in families, who's got the power, who makes decisions, negotiations and all that. We also prioritised the issues of gender and family violence, and everything related to sexuality, sexual choices, and sexual responsibility. But we also dealt with racism, disability, sexism, classism, and alcoholism. We want to deal with urban/rural discrimination but haven't done so because we don't feel well equipped to do that yet.

PE/AC: There's also the issue of getting national coverage.

PE/AB: Right. There's no single TV station that reaches the entire country. There are very severe problems of signal strength and pockets in the country where even the main TV station does not get to so there's no way to say that you can have truly national coverage. At the moment we have 11 local cable TV stations rebroadcasting the show. This is a very new phenomenon in Nicaragua, local cable didn't exist 2 years ago. Also about 40 local radio stations use material from our radio show since local stations have limited resources to do research on any one topic. They all want to talk about this stuff but they don't know anything about it and they don't have the time or the resources to get bibliographies so if we can give them materials and scripts they can then talk about it themselves live on the air and get phone calls and generate local debate.

SC/SG: It occurs to me what I didn't say was that part of the Soul City strategy is to use the brand and the popularity of the TV particularly to extend the strategy to adult learning and to learning in schools and into advocacy programmes and so on. The work that is done through the electronic media is extended quite a lot through doing other things but using the popularity and the brand values which we've analysed and which people respect and trust.

PE/AC: A difference between us on the brand thing is that each of our "products" already had its own brand name from before we put them all together in a combined strategy, so we couldn't do that. Each product had its own life and since they had been distributed and shared with a lot of organisations, a lot of people in Nicaragua don't even know that its Puntos de Encuentro who produces it. For instance, in our 1996 evaluation we found out that most people who received and read our magazine La Boletina, didn't know that Puntos produced it. They thought that the local organisation that gave them the magazine was the one that produced it. We weren't tooting our own horn.

PE/AB: In the context of Nicaragua it was very important, in the particular historical moment, not to be promoting our own organisation, since what we were doing was designed to promote inter-communications among groups. So in fact there was a part of Puntos that said, when we got these results in the evaluation, we have to up our image and our brand recognition, they have to know it's Puntos. Others of us said, you know what we got from people not knowing it was us? We got collective buy-in by all of the people who read it, who like it and who are dedicated to it - which we wouldn't have gotten if we had been pushing brand name recognition.

SC/SG: What you are saying is that the brand is the organisation that produces it but what we're saying is it's the actual television programme and theory which became a brand name itself. It's not about the organisation. In fact, most people think that the television series is produced by our national broadcaster they don't know us as an organisation. But they buy into the life of the series, the place, the people, so that's slightly different.

PE/AB: OK, you're using "brand name" in a different way. That's true, people bought into La Boletina without knowing who did it.

CI: What kind of opportunities and the obstacles do you see for your organisations over whatever time horizon you're using for your planning right now?

PE/AB: Despite success, and being quite appealing to many people, we don't have money and it's very hard to get funding. Because of particular problems with the Nicaraguan television industry - lack of reruns for example - in order to keep going you have to stay on the air and that requires money. We hope to be the first show in Nicaraguan TV history, to actually have reruns to fill the gap while we start to produce another series. But we don't have any money to produce that next series. So one of our challenges is to stay on the air, and find the money to get production going in time to get on the air. Given the state of the advertising industry in Nicaragua, even in the best of cases, advertising money could only cover a tiny percentage of production costs (which is why there are no commercial dramas produced in Nicaragua), so we're still dependent on international aid.

Another obstacle, or challenge, is that we're very short staffed and we don't have a pool of available professionals. This is not a problem just for us; it's a problem for the whole country, so even if we had money, we wouldn't have a pool of professionals in the country to be able to make the burden lighter for us. We are totally self-taught. A difference with Soul City I think is that we can't hire a production company. We had to make our own production company and none of us really had any experience. We could hire experienced cameramen, soundmen and editors but we had to put the team together ourselves. We had to get our own studio, director, everything. So, for us just the challenges of producing the TV show are really big.

PE/AC: I think one obstacle or challenge is to combine participatory process but still produce the whole of the strategy and at the same time be efficient and cost-effective. Doing this within the time frame, we have is very complicated.

PE/AB: Which is why we want to know about Soul City's 18-month process.

PE/AC: Yes because ours is a 6 month process, and it's very very short, especially because there are a lot of expectations of participation from the organisations we work with because they are used to that from us. I mean they know participation is our style so they expect to be consulted. They don't see us as a big corporate thing. They see us as a peer organisation that's doing a great job and they're very happy to work with us. Balancing time and participation may be one of the big difficulties we have to face if we want to keep the alliances or go deeper in them.

PE/AB: I want to say one thing that responds to something Sue said about working with different organisations and different issues and different series. We actually work with the same organisations over and over again. We will work with different organisations to consult about storylines about a particular issue but in fact at a local level they're all the same organisations that work on a number of topics. One of the challenges this presents is that there's a tremendous demand on us to deal with everything that everyone else is dealing with and they want us to take on everything. There is a challenge in meeting peoples' expectations and when you start to disappoint people, even if they didn't have a "right" to expect it because you didn't promise anything, they've already created their own expectations. So when you start disappointing their own created expectations, it gets very complicated because they feel you're not responding to their needs, even if you never said you were going to fill that need – and boy, that is really hard.

CI: Are you referring to NGOs or other kinds of organisations in Nicaragua?

PE/AB: Local grassroots organisations, and also local media. Local radio stations may say what they really need is to get advertising income to survive themselves. They want to see how we can help them survive because none of the NGOs and none of the local groups ever want to pay for publicity; they all want their messages to be aired for free. The local stations say fine, but we have to survive too. And the NGOs are saying to the radio stations, we are also facing a financial crisis, how are we going to survive and pay for our spots which are for public service? So there are a number of complicated issues that come up when you actually start putting it out on the ground.

CI: Any opportunities?

PE/AB: We have an opportunity to build on the success of the first year and really get it off the ground. I think we were a pretty big deal in the first year but we feel that If we can take what we've learned this time and continue it we could absolutely do it better in the next phase of implementation and really make it big time. I don't mean just big time that the TV show is more of a hit than it already is, I mean big time in really getting some of the links to be much more concrete and working.

PE/AC: Our first challenge was to build our own production company and that was a huge thing in Nicaragua because we had to create a lot of things that didn't exist even in the television industry here. Now that we have got that it's a big opportunity to do a lot more things.

This whole strategy changed our organisation, there is a "before" and an "after". In terms of building synergy among our own programmes, we'll never be able to work again as we worked before. That's a very big and positive change. I think we are going to stay on this track and we have learned a lot of things because of this strategy. We have been able to form relations with private enterprise and with different kinds of people than we had worked with before

CI: Through the production company?

PE/AB: Yes, through the production company but also through being on TV and through being part of the TV world.

PE/AC: And through being more a part of the main stream. We are now operating outside of the NGO world and a lot of people relate to us for reasons which are not the reasons other NGOs or circles were relating to us before. Before this strategy we were considered simply a feminist NGO, very specialised on youth and women's' issues. But this has opened new doors. We are still talking about the same things; we are doing the same things but the way we are doing those things is now absolutely different, and this has changed everything. It's a very big opportunity to take advantage of.

PE/AB: And its not only private enterprise, we didn't relate to all of you people - the communications for development people - we really didn't have a relationship with the international communication community. We didn't have a relationship with the health education community because we weren't a health organisation, we were a rights' organisation or a feminist organisation, so we have gotten to know a ton of people as a result of getting into all of this.

CI: Soul City, what are your challenges, obstacles, and opportunities?

SC/SG: Let's start with the challenges because I think it's more difficult to name in some ways. One of the challenges is around maintaining partnerships and alliances with various different organisations. Because we deal with numerous topics and we are seen to be reaching so many people, such huge audiences and it's considered so important, we have to maintain many, many relationships, and that is very time consuming. At the same time as you are maintaining those relationships and partnerships you are also doing the materials development, message design, all that sort of stuff - that is a very real challenge.

People want their messages put across, there are also demands that people make of you that you can't always fulfill which is very difficult. In fact, being an NGO you want to be able to fulfill those things, that is what you want to be able to do.

The second challenge for us is around social mobilisation and getting much more into getting people on the ground taking more actions as a result of relating to the mass media. And what we're trying to do, particularly around our children's series is to build on the ideas we've shown on television of groups of children taking actions together and creating a series that we call Soul Buddies Club to get kids acting together, doing things, having fun together, but also talking about some of the issues, writing in, all those kinds of things. And we think that that kind of social action and mobilising people on the ground will be very positive.

Another challenge is possible audience fatigue. We're now going for our 6th adult series and maybe our audience is going to get bored or tired of us. They're becoming more sophisticated and there are more options in the South African market for other soaps, other educational programming and so on. It is an ongoing challenge to keep our popularity while still giving high quality messaging.

Another set of challenges is around capacity building. Since we started, one of the issues that has been difficult for us is finding good local script writers who write in the home languages that we use. What's difficult is that even though we've developed many training programmes and we've had trainers come from all sorts of other places, people are headhunted from us. As soon as you train somebody they leave to work somewhere else. They have to because they can't work for a short period and then not work. And so you lose. It's a constant cycle of training people which is good in some ways but it's a challenge in other ways. You're endlessly trying to build the capacity that would make life a bit easier for us.

Another big challenge for Soul City is - what's the right word? - international popularity and getting any number of requests to come and talk about what we do and how we do it and at the same time trying to maintain what we do and keeping it going. This is a real challenge because there's not a huge number of people involved in the NGO. We have to keep our work going even though we want very much to share what we've done with other people. Balancing this within our limited capacity is quite a big challenge. And we are, unfortunately, in certain situations; having to turn people down and say sorry we just can't help you please look at our web site. That's a very difficult one.

Soul City/Esca Scheepers (SC/ES): If you look at the quantitative audience reception items across 4 or 5 items there's consistently a 15% negative perception of Soul City. When I saw those results, I thought, well that's pretty good. Where can you have a smaller percentage of people who will not like you - 85% positive, 15% negative, I think it's pretty good. And even the audience ratings we mentioned before, I mean you cannot get higher. It's almost as if it's on a cliff hanger where you're saying how can it get higher, how can the 15% decrease? I wouldn't expect it to decrease and I thought, after the evaluation, it's pretty much at the top of what is realistic. I don't mind saying that but keeping it there is the challenge we're talking about.

SC/SG: And I think with that challenge what we have done is to try and keep new interest and new vibrancy in each series. In fact we have a different coordinator or manager for each series so that you don't get fatigue. Because you DO get fatigued. I sometimes think if I ever see another script again I'm going to cry and it becomes like that so I think its really important.

In terms of opportunities, I think we can now begin to extend the Soul City vehicle, which we have already begun in a way through the Soul City Children's Series, but also extend the social mobilisation. We have the opportunity to expand our impact through using our research and programme experience to influence other projects in the country. This will help make it useful for other people, not only for ourselves, and give more coherence to some of the messaging in South Africa particularly around AIDS.

Another opportunity is that through the process that we've developed there are a lot more people who are media literate in the way that we've become more media literate and more health communication literate. So, we are expanding the capacity base within the NGO sphere and I think that presents many opportunities.

I think in terms of funding we have a window of opportunity at the moment in Soul City. We are fairly well funded and even have the private sector approaching us asking if they can fund us. So, we're pretty secure for a short time anyway.

We have opportunities around sharing what we've learned, particularly through our evaluation which has been really, really interesting. I think this will help feed into the way that we do our work in future and how we focus some of the messaging.

PE/AB: Dissemination is a challenge for us. I was talking about this the other day with Sue. There is interest in other countries for Sexto Sentido, but sometimes it's theoretical interest: they love it but ... When they saw it in Canada, for example, they said it was too "low class", not in terms of production, but in terms of the social class of the characters! So, there was an opportunity to export the show and maybe get some income from selling it but when it was seen they didn't want it because it was about "poor people". This is a bit ironic for us because here most people would say that the show is about people whose general social level is higher than the great majority of the population.

We had another opportunity in Mexico where commercial TV producers wanted to buy the scripts to make a Mexican adaptation. They said that in Mexico there is a creative crisis of fatigue. They said they just can't think of interesting things to say anymore and that they thought that we had created almost a new genre because at least in Latin America, the half-hour weekly drama just doesn't exist. They also found the way we took these issues, dealt with them dramatically and often with a sense of humour was somewhat new. So, in a way, I guess, we accidentally invented a new genre at least for Latin American TV.

There are opportunities to get it into other countries but it's a huge challenge to figure out for us now how much time and energy to spend on trying to push it out there - either for income purposes or just for international visibility - versus how much to concentrate on just getting the next series done. It is difficult to determine how much we should think about issues of international distribution possibilities in the conception of the next series or whether we should just go ahead it make it totally Nicaraguan again. We think one of the things that make it so successful is that it's Nicaraguans seeing themselves on the screen; all the transition scenes are of places that people know, the slang is Nicaraguan slang. On the other hand, we could make it more homogenous so that Guatemalans, Costa Ricans, Hondurans, Panamanians etc would also accept the show. But there are risks. We might shoot ourselves in the foot with our Nicaraguan audience if we aim for new audiences but on the other hand, if we don't seek wider audiences we might shoot ourselves in the foot for never going beyond our own little country ... Like, what's the difference between Nicaragua and South Africa in terms of audience? What's the population of South Africa?

SC/ES: 40 million.

PE/AB: 40 million, we have 5 million! It makes a difference because funders question us on why we'd do all this just for Nicaragua?

SC/SG: It's very interesting because Soul City also has not been very successful in selling our series. Everybody loves it. You hear at international meetings, "Oh we're so impressed, it's brilliant. It's wonderful. We watch it and we cry." But we cannot sell it to the north at all and countries have said they're not interested. They don't like subtitling, they don't like black people, they don't like poor people, it's not relevant, the issues are different, so on and so forth. That's one of 'their' things. We have managed to sell it to one country in the Caribbean and I'm not sure which country it is. I think it might have been Barbados.

For me the issue that you mentioned about should it be Nicaraguan or not - I think that for me the most important thing is that it must be Nicaraguan. It must be Nicaraguans talking because once you start generalising it doesn't become real and have real people. And if they're not real people in stories, it's not going to extend.

PE/AB: But American soaps are even exported to China.

SC/SG: Yes and we get American soaps in South Africa but they don't necessarily speak to people in the same way. I think that's what makes good drama. Good drama is one of the things that make these shows work. And a drama about domestic violence in New Zealand, Once Were Warriors, for example, will speak to anybody but it's very specific and more powerful for a community in New Zealand because it speaks to their human condition and it's very relevant. The point that I'm making is that I think things that are generally real and have humanity, speak to many people but if you try to make it too superficial to suit too wide an audience, I think you may lose it all.

PE/AC: I agree and the challenge I want to talk about is evaluation. It's not easy and the more sophisticated we get the more frustrated we get in some ways also. We are not satisfied with what we are doing even though we are evaluating much better than two years ago, not to mention 5 or 10 years ago. I think that better evaluation is a very big challenge and it's not an optional one. I mean we need it. We can't just say, "Ah well, it's too difficult let's drop it", as we could do with some parts of the strategy. Perhaps evaluation could be the beginning of a discussion about south-south collaboration, given the resources that Soul City has committed to evaluation.

SC/SG: I think to go back historically in terms of Soul City, when we started our first evaluation was a very controlled cross-sectional study. It was useful for us because we didn't know anything about it so I don't think you need to be too concerned about being too complex. I think first of all it's important to remember that it's unusual for people to evaluate any sort of mass media and just the fact that you're doing it is brilliant. And you really should not be intimidated. Our first years' evaluation was totally exceptional and was partly funder driven - they wanted to know does this stuff work or not – but also partly because of a particular interest of mine within Soul City. It's not important to do a complicated difficult evaluation, it's more important to just get some of the basics out.

SC/ES: There has definitely been an evolution in Soul City's evaluation history. I think it has been needs driven. There is a danger of doing too complicated an evaluation too soon where you shoot yourself in the foot. You can overshoot with evaluation and really do yourself an injustice. So it is about scaling the evaluation to the need and to what is realistic. And being on air for 9 months would require a certain type of evaluation and not another one.

CI: Let's talk a bit about South-South collaboration. Maybe the best way to start is to talk about what Soul City has meant in terms of the development of Puntos' programming and then take it from there. It would also be good if you could consider what kind of future you see for this collaboration - specifically between your two organisations but also more generally in terms of edutainment.

PE/AB: I remember, it must have been about two years ago, way before we were on the air, and when we were still struggling to write a first script and get some money, I saw a very small thing somewhere, a one paragraph blurb, that talked about a TV thing in South Africa,. I thought, oh my God, here's somebody doing the same thing we're trying to do but they're already doing it! At the time, I was so busy that I didn't even write. I remember saving the message so that I would have the email address. I kept seeing it every week and I had it on my list every week to write to Soul City to find out who they were and what was going on. It's like any of these social issues we deal with, just knowing somebody else is out there doing it was an inspiration.

We realised we had been very isolated as an organisation in our own communications work. It was only after all of this that we found out that there were other experiences of social soaps, groups like Population Communications International (PCI) who do their social soaps all around the world. But all of the PCI initiatives that I had heard about were all in coordination with Ministries of Health and UN-type organisations. There were huge contracts that came in from the government or from a UN organisation and then hired local professionals to do their work for them.

When I say Soul City was really inspiring it's because I thought: "this looks like us" - an independent organisation that's doing its thing. That means that it can be done because we thought for a long time that we were really being way too ambitious or too audacious or too something and that the reason it was taking us so long to get it off the ground was because we were in fact nuts and that it really wasn't possible. We knew there was a difference between South Africa and Nicaragua but we said, Okay it can be done. And they're thinking about it in the same way, which means we can't be too far off.

I also think that there's this kind of cosmic historical connection between South Africa and Nicaragua. I was saying this to Thomas Tufte because he was trying to understand why the connection between Nicaragua and South Africa. He said but why not Brazil? And I said, you know, there is a difference. There were social and political revolutions in both of these countries. Of course there are differences between the two countries' histories, but I would venture to bet that all of you who are involved in Soul City were involved in the struggle to change the system in South Africa, no? The social mobilisation and the consciousness that come out of revolutionary movements are very important. In Nicaragua now, even though many people who fought in the Sandinista overthrow of the dictatorship and then were part of a revolutionary government are now disillusioned with what's happened since - and this may be happening in South Africa - it doesn't take away the passion for social change. Nor does it take away the capacity for social mobilisation that has been built so that if you don't find inspiration in your government or your party, you still can find it with people's movements. We have definitely found inspiration and passion doing this and it speaks to peoples' needs. So for whatever reason, there's always been this kind of cosmic connection between Nicaragua and South Africa, there always seems to be a back and forth between us.

Getting back to following up with Soul City I found more information on the web. Let me first say I'm frustrated with the web because I don't have time to surf but - I will give an advertisement to comminit (The Communication Initiative) - the comminit web page is the best thing I have ever seen. It is incredibly useful and efficient. I can go exactly to what I need and get what I need from it, which is just incredibly useful for me where I am. Finding out more about Soul City from comminit has been really useful.

SC/SG: For me, the Communication Initiative web site has been very useful not only in looking things up but also in referring people to it and saving me a lot of time. When they say, why don't you tell me all about it, I say just go to The Communication Initiative web site and have a look and people love it. I've had really positive feedback. I think it's a very useful resource, especially for the south where that stuff is not easily available and people haven't really thought through those issues in any major way.

SC/ES: I think it's very important to have a Spanish version. I think a lot of people don't have access to this kind of debate because of the numbers of documents and books written in English and not Spanish. I look forward to seeing more crossing over of materials between the sites.

PE/AB: Absolutely. Also, there's lots of stuff written in Spanish that English-speakers don't have access to! Back to our learning more about Soul City, there was some correspondence between one of our researchers, Sarah Bradshaw, and Soul City; actually it was you with you, Sue. There were just a couple of messages back and forth, but I swear to God, just knowing Soul City was out there and that we had soul mates somewhere else was very comforting.

PE/AC: It was also useful to set up the evaluation. We used a lot of information that we got from you to design our evaluation in the first stage so it was quite useful. The first moment was just to know you and not feel so alone but after that it was more practical and now we're hoping to actually learn many more things from you.

SC/SG: This is interesting for us to hear because for us there were a few emails and a number of questions asked about the evaluation but we really didn't think a lot about the communication.

CI: My question at this point is what about the future? Do you think you will continue or even deepen this relationship?

SC/SG: I think that working collaboratively with other organisations is always beneficial and sharing other peoples' experiences is useful and always impacts on the work that you do. This dialogue that we're having now at this table is useful. Whether we've gone ahead before and done something there are always new things that one can learn. I think for me the interesting thing is the similarities between the countries. In the past, we've only had dialogue with the north or with other southern countries that have nothing similar happening. To have some sort of similar experience to communicate with is very exciting. I think that ongoing discussions will definitely happen about issues that arise. And it's always useful to bounce ideas off other people.

PE/AB: I agree, for example, in conversations we have had in the past days we have already said that we wanted to know, very specifically, what things had worked, what things hadn't, what Soul City would do different next time, what they'd do more of, what they'd do less of. Esca told us you find it out by doing it and I said yes but you've done it before and if we can shortcut some of the errors that would be useful. That kind of information sharing is very useful to us. Sue has agreed to share Soul City's script development and testing strategy with us, for example. Having Soul City around is like having a big sister.

CI: Thank you all for taking the time to talk to us tonight.