ZATHU MALAWI LORYA ROBLIN

Introduction video. © Girl Effect (girleffect.org)

Narrative Music Video 1: Celebrating friendship between girls and boys. © Girl Effect (girleffect.org)

Narrative Music Video 2: Challenging gender roles. © Girl Effect (girleffect.org)

Narrative Music Video 3: Daring to be yourself. © Girl Effect (girleffect.org)

Narrative Music Video 4: Together forging a better Malawi. © Girl Effect (girleffect.org)

CASE STUDY SUMMARY:

In Malawi, girls between the ages of 15 and 17 are nine times more likely to contract HIV than boys the same age*. Harmful gender norms – forced and early marriage, teenage pregnancy, gender-based violence etc. – reinforce gender inequality and lead to a disproportionate number of HIV cases amongst girls. In 2017, alongside PEPFAR Dreams (The U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) and GAVI (Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization), Girl Effect saw the opportunity to use the power of mass media and brand storytelling to tackle the social norms that reinforce gender inequality and lead to such high levels of HIV and AIDS.

Messages of ‘girl empowerment’ were everywhere in Malawi, on government billboards, in schools and in newspapers. But the narrative of empowerment was empty. It was focused on assets such as education and jobs and lacked a deeper connection to girls having the confidence to make their own decisions and to society believing in their ability to do so. As for boys, because the public attention was excessively focused on girls, they felt ostracised. They believed that girls were moving forward at their own expense. Our key challenge was to reframe the value of girls without exacerbating further these existing tensions - i.e. girls’ empowerment being commoditised and girls being resented by boys.

Through our ethnographic research, we discovered that though girls and boys had been raised apart all their lives, there was a nascent but growing aspiration for collective involvement and mutual support between them. This desire stemmed from the deep-seated belief that together they could achieve more than when apart. To reframe the value of girls we had to rally boys to their cause and focus on their shared aspirations. Unlike all the HIV programs which had been targeting their efforts solely on girls and indirectly exacerbating girls and boys' divisions further, we decided to take a bold and disruptive approach: uniting girls and boys into one generation **.

Our brand proposition became: Strength in Unity. And all our content and media activities would demonstrate that girls and boys can and do have non-sexualised and positive relationships as friends; fight the deep-seated belief that girls weren’t as valuable as boys; and provide girls and boys with the tools to forge a better, more equal Malawi.

Lastly, to make this new progressive idea a part of the local culture, we created a music band made of girls and boys whose mission would be to create the new sound of Malawi…

RESULTS:

Zathu reached 2/3rd of the nation (6.7m) within 6 months of launch.
45% of the nation has consumed Zathu (4.5m) in 2018.
86% of people who listened to Zathu agreed that the brand has taught them females should be treated equally to males.
91% said Zathu helped make them feel more in control of the issues that affect their lives.
93% of girls and 89% of boys said Zathu has helped them improve their friendships with the opposite sex.

(Source: 2018 Zathu Brand Surveys)

RECOGNITION & AWARDS:

Note: I was Senior Brand Strategist at Girl Effect and headed the brand, content and media strategy launch of Zathu working directly with the Brand Portfolio Director, and a local team of Content, Gender, and M&E specialists, as well as agencies (Roofhouse Ogilvy Malawi and Lake of Stars).

* PEPFAR; ** It was a first for Girl Effect which until now had solely targeted girls via its media programs.

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