Soap Operas For Social Justice
We are joined by Bill Ryerson, the founder and long-time leader of one of the most effective sustainable population organizations in the world—Population Media Center. A nonprofit leader internationally for the past two decades, Population Media Center's TV and radio shows have promoted important social and cultural changes and have helped 500 million people in more than 50 countries. Bill discusses the inspiration for PMC’s groundbreaking edu-entertainment—the Sabido-Bandura method, a combination Albert Bandura's social cognitive theory—that people learn from role models whose behavior they wish to emulate, and Miguel Sabido’s serialized dramas that make use of such role models through mass media. We also hear about some of the most uplifting success stories Bill has witnessed over his 50-year long career in the field, as well as PMC’s exciting future plans. As someone who, along with his wife, chose not to have children decades before the childfree choice was popular, we are excited to also add Bill to our “Celebrating the Childfree Choice” page!
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Alexandra Paul 0:00
The Population Media Center has used entertaining stories to help 500 million people live healthier lives in more than 50 countries. From the United States to Burundi, TV to radio, human rights to environmental issues, simple to complex media markets, everyone is drawn to well-told stories.
Alan Ware 0:25
In this episode, we'll be talking with Bill Ryerson, the founder and longtime leader of one of the most effective sustainable population organizations in the world, Population Media Center. Bill has the breadth and depth of experience in promoting a sustainable population that few people can match. We're delighted to have Bill share much of the wisdom he's gained in this episode of the Overpopulation Podcast.
Nandita Bajaj 0:57
Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast where we tirelessly make overshoot and overpopulation common knowledge. That's the first step in right-sizing the scale of our human footprint so that it is in balance with life on Earth, enabling all species to thrive. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware 1:18
And I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance, a nonprofit that collaborates with experts and other organizations to educate about the impacts of human overpopulation and overconsumption on the planet, people, and animals. Before we move on to today's guests, we've got some listener feedback, and this is from Joe Bish, who actually works at Population Media Center with Bill Ryerson. Joe is the Senior Advisor in issue advocacy, and he's the person who curates the contents for Population Media Center’s weekly newsletter that goes out to thousands of people. So he says, ‘Just this morning, I learned about the latest podcast production from Population Balance, which features Eileen Crist. Eileen’s thought leadership around population, egocentrism and global rewilding always impresses me. But this particular interview is absolutely breathtaking in places. I wish the whole world had 60 minutes to listen to her philosophical command of the issues at hand, her adroit language skills and her ability to frame solving the human predicament as a series of ethical choices to be made based on considerations of all life on earth, not just human self interest.’
Nandita Bajaj 2:33
Thank you so much for that feedback, Joe. We couldn't agree with you more. If you have feedback or guest recommendations to share, you can write to us using the contact form on our site population balance.org, or by emailing us at podcast at populationbalance.org. And now on to today's guest, Bill Ryerson. Bill Ryerson is the founder and president of Population Media Center, an organization that improves the health and well being of people around the world through entertainment-education strategies. He also serves as board chair of the Population Institute, which works in partnership with Population Media Center. PMC creates long running, serialized dramas on radio and television, in which characters evolve into role models for the audience on such issues as family size decisions and use of family planning. Mr. Ryerson has a fifty year history of working in the field of reproductive health, including thirty years of experience in the use of social change communications in various cultural settings worldwide. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Biology from Amherst College and a Master of Philosophy degree in Biology from Yale University. And now on to our discussion. Bill, it's really wonderful to have you in the studio with us today. Population Media Center's groundbreaking work has been mentioned by us and our guests so many times on our podcast that we felt it was about time to let you have the floor to speak about your incredible work in entertainment-educational media programming that you do at PMC. Of course, PMC's work has been recognized as some of the most effective on the planet for creating positive social change, including an impressive reduction in fertility rates in communities exposed to your educational media programming. Welcome to the podcast, Phil.
Bill Ryerson 04:27
Nandita, thanks so much for having me on. It's great pleasure.
Nandita Bajaj 04:30
Wonderful. Well, we'll start with a bit of background about Population Media Center's work. PMC uses something called the Sabido Entertainment-Education Methodology in creating its TV and radio programs. Could you give us a brief history of the Sabido Method and also an explanation of how you use it in PMC's Programming?
Bill Ryerson 04:52
Sure. Miguel Sabido was in the 1970s until the late ninties, vice president of the largest commercial network in Mexico - Televisa, and he was both vice president for audience research and a producer of telenovelas, the most popular format in all of Latin America for TV shows. And he became aware in the early seventies that beyond selling products, which as he puts it, is the purpose of commercial television. And he was influencing other behaviors of the audience - they were modeling their behavior after characters with regard to hairstyles and clothing styles, and even names of children, and he became curious as to what was going on. And he got himself up to Stanford University and met with Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura, who since the seventies, has been known for his work in identifying the influence of role models and what makes a role model more or less influential with the observer, and how psychologically that works. And also the influence of particularly role models, but other inputs as well, that give people what he calls self-efficacy - that is both the belief that they have the right to do something new and the ability to do it. So if a girl is growing up in the United States while Hillary Clinton is secretary of state, they might go, "Oh, that's a job that maybe I could aspire to." So giving people the idea that change is possible is important to bring about change. And if people think change is impossible, they won't try. So Bandura's social learning theory about role modeling and social cognitive theory about self-efficacy, our foundational theories behind the work of Population Media Center. So Sabido studied the tape of the interview that he did with Bandura and then read the writings of Paul MacLean, a brain scientist who studied the locations in the human brain of different functions. And one of the most important findings he made was that most behavioral decisions are made in the parts of the brain that deal primarily with emotion. We pride ourselves on being rational beings, but in fact, most of our decisions are made based on primarily emotion. So Sabido realized not only does this explain why people are modeling their behavior after our characters, but in fact, I could do some good in Mexican society while perhaps not losing audience share. And he created a whole theoretical framework for how to use entertainment television for social good, and started with a 1974 telenovela dealing with adult education. The Mexican government's Department of Public Education had been running public service announcements on Televisa's airwaves, announcing their free literacy classes that one could take in the evening, and Sabido decided, okay, let me try to create a telenovela about illiterate adults. And he also recognized that the most emotion-based format in television is melodrama, so - which he was already an expert at, so he created positive and negative characters with regard to the value of adult education. And then middle of the road characters who were illiterate and suffering from the consequences, such as poverty and unemployment.
And the positive characters and negative characters gave conflicting advice to these illiterate characters. The negative character said, "Look, you're just too old and too stupid to learn. Forget about it. Learn to live with your poverty," which is a message many illiterates get. Positive character said, "Of course you can learn to read and write, you know, you're as smart as anybody else. You just were bypassed by formal education. But it's not too late - you can take these free evening classes and better your situation in life." So one by one these characters did that, struggled through the classes, got their diplomas, and got better jobs and their lives improved. And Sabido held back his most popular character, or grandfather figure, until near the end of the program. This was five nights a week for a year. And in the last few weeks this grandfather figure graduates in a highly emotional scene where he breaks down in tears of joy, because finally he can read all the letters he's gotten from his granddaughter over many years that he's been collecting in a box.
And they follow that with an ad saying, "Perhaps you too would like to do what this man has done, and here are the addresses where you can register for classes." And Sabido warned the Department of Public Education that this might generate a crowd, and asked if they could handle a big increase in people signing up. And they said, "Oh, no problem. You know, our PSAs are so excellent. We like your show. It's reinforcing our PSAs, but PSAs are so excellent. We signed up 99,000 people over the last year." So he ran that episode, and the following day, 250,000 people came to register. One day, as opposed to the whole year before.
And by the time the serial ended, 840,000 people had signed up for adult education. So eight-fold increase over the a year before, through a program that pulled in a third of the nation's viewers and was highly profitable. Now that's a great development model. And this was something that Sabido then decided he would sort of make his trademark. And Mexico had legalized contraception in 1973. And he said, "Okay, I know I've done adult education, let me try family planning." So he created characters named Marta and Jesus, a couple who were in a fairly new marriage, they had two children. And her parents had had ten children and lived in poverty. And they saw their friends falling into poverty as well, as they had baby after baby. And Marta decides she doesn't want to have any more children. So she separates her bed from her husband's bed. And Jesus was not at all happy about this. And so it created a lot of disharmony in the family. And then Marta finds out about the what we used to call the rhythm method. And so she has a calendar of the month with one week X out and she sits him down at the table in the kitchen and says, "Now, here's how this works. And that week, we have to be disciplined. But since we're not in that week, right now, we can go dancing tonight if you'd like." Yes, that sounds good. So they're go dancing and get carried away. And then the following week, he comes up to her in the kitchen and says, "Let's go dancing again. That was so much fun last week." And she points to the calendar and frowns and says, "No, no, no, you know what happens when we go dancing? And we need to be disciplined this week, as you agreed?" And he said, "Yeah, sure." And she said, "Well say it like you mean it." And he said, "You can have your discipline. I thought this was a whim, I thought you would have forgotten about it by now." And he storms out on her. So remember, this is a soap opera. So then she goes to her aunt and says, "What do I do? The marriage is really in trouble." And the aunt says, "Well, there's something medical you can do that Mexico has made possible in the last few years. And you should take Jesus to see a doctor." Of course, Jesus objects because they're not sick. But eventually she convinces them to go to the doctor. And by design, Sabido had the doctor waste a whole bunch of their time talking about things they don't teach in medical school, like their spiritual life.
And then he refers them to a Planned Parenthood clinic. This was the whole point. So again, with close to a third of the nation's viewers watching, they sit in front of a clinician and learn about all the methods of contraception, choose an IUD and lived happily ever after. There is an immediate 33% increase in the clinic attendance, and a 23% increase in the sale of contraceptives in pharmacies. Sabido also role modeled advocacy. So he had characters who had discovered the benefits of family planning and smaller family norms advocating it to people who had not in the show. And then he ran the equivalent of an 800 number that people could call to sign up to become volunteer promoters, and three thousand people called that number. So, thus began the Sabido Methodology. Sabido ultimately did five programs addressing family planning and reproductive health and subjects like teen pregnancy. And during those five in the late seventies, and early eighties, Mexico had the most dramatic decline in fertility rate of any developing country in the twentieth century up until that time. So, and the UN recognized this with the UN Population Prize in 1988. So at any rate, that's how it started. And there have been numerous examples, and I've been involved really since the mid-eighties, in the use of this methodology, and increasingly in the measurement of its effects. And just before starting Population Media Center, I was involved in setting up a semi-controlled field experiment in Tanzania, where part of the country got the radio serial drama on the radios, the dominant medium there, and part of the country got music during that time slot. And otherwise, they got all the other programs dealing with family planning and other reproductive health issues like HIV prevention.
And so, during the two years of the initial broadcast, in all but one control area, 58% of the population reported listening in those broadcast areas, and 82% of the listeners said the program had caused them to change their own behavior to avoid HIV infection.
And the most common change they cited was reduction in the number of partners, the second most common change was condom use. So to try to find some way to, a proxy to measure whether that was really true, we got the condom distribution data from the National AIDS Control Program of the government broken down by district, because distribution is done in response to demand. And in the control area where they got all the other programs related to HIV except this program, there was a 16% increase in condom distribution, while in the broadcast areas there was a 153% increase in condom distribution.
I also, in that experiment, got the Minister of Health to have health care workers at ministry family planning clinics ask new adopters why they had come, and to give us their numbers. The data showed in the control area, there was zero change in the number of new family planning adopters at ministry clinics. In the broadcast areas, there was a 32% increase. And when asked where they had come to the clinic, 49% of the new adopters named the program by name. Well, when we broadcast the program in the control area the next two years, we got the same results. So it wasn't the people in the control area were somehow different. And then there was a calculation done and a paper on it published in Journal of Health Communication showing taking all the costs: writing, acting, production, airtime, distribution, all the research costs, and dividing that total by the number of people who had adopted family planning and attributed it to the program came out to thirty-two cents US. The cost per person who said they changed behavior to avoid HIV infection was eight cents.
At this point, I said, "Okay, I know what I'm doing in the rest of my career." And I started Population Media Center. And after a few efforts to get funding in Ethiopia, ended up taking Miguel Sabido there, and he trained our writing team in Ethiopia. And we've done nine serial dramas, and I won't go into all the data on all of them, but worldwide we've done programs in fifty-three countries, we're just starting in a fifty-fourth, Liberia, and we've reached a combined audience of five hundred and thirty million people.
Nandita Bajaj 16:39
Wow, that was such an incredible story. I thought we knew a lot about PMC, but I'm glad that you went into that level of detail. I just love the philosophy behind it, that it's based on cultivating self-efficacy and confidence in people to do what is great for them. And also that it incorporates the goals and concerns of local people into the creation of these characters and stories to enable that change.
Bill Ryerson 17:07
All the characters and storylines are based on very intensive formative research to understand how people are living, what their views are, what the issues are, so that as they watch or listen to the program, they're recognizing the characters. And in fact, we've gotten letters from people, "You wrote the story about my uncle." So people see these characters as part of their lives, and and in some cases, write letters to them.
Nandita Bajaj 17:34
Wow. I remember reading about a show in India that was inspired by the same method. It was in the mid-eighties, called Hum Log. I grew up there around that time, and I remember the show, I don't remember all of the details of it. But I do recall reading about it recently, that it had the same impact in terms of creating these really positive social changes and communities. And they ended up receiving upwards of half a million letters, telling them to create shows that can break through the stigma of marrying someone that's arranged for them. And it had the same effect. People felt that they could identify so much with the characters, that it felt like it was them.
Bill Ryerson 18:18
There's a book by two communication scholars on this program called India's Information Revolution. Everett Rogers, who was Associate Dean of the Annenberg School for Communications, and Arvind Singhal his then PhD student who's now a professor at University of Texas, El Paso, did research related to the impact of Hum Log. The story behind Hum Log is in the late seventies, well all the seventies, I was at the Population Institute running the youth and student division and a colleague, David Poindexter was running the communication division, and he discovered Sabido's first family planning telenovela in 1978. And he convinced Sabido to go with him to meet Indira Gandhi, in the early eighties, before her assassination, and they convinced her that, in fact, this was a better approach than coercion which she had stumbled into.
And in fact, the great thing about the Sabido Methodology in general is it is very respectful of human rights. It's never telling people what to do. Most public health messaging says, "Use a bed net, wear a condom." This does not. It just models behavior and shows consequences: good, bad and transitional. And so she authorized the creation of Hum Log before she died, and then a man named Manohar Shyam Joshi, whom I knew, wrote this telenovela, and as you said, it had huge impacts in India.
Nandita Bajaj 19:40
Love that.
Alan Ware 19:41
Yeah, you've had great success with this bottom-up changing of social attitudes and norms through storytelling, and not a top-down policy approach. And that's definitely similar to our focus at Population Balance. It seems that in any system where you're hoping to have democratic legitimacy and buy-in from any populace, that a lot of the impetus for policy change needs to come from changes in public opinion that then creates pressure on policymakers. And as we've seen with China's one-child policy, and India's forced sterilization - very unpopular top-down approaches. And based on your great success in this bottom-up norms-shifting attitude approach, have you seen other people in the sustainable population field realize that impact and greatly appreciate that impact?
Bill Ryerson 20:27
Yes. When you think about what China did in its one-child policy while it was in existence, the reality behind the situation was they used primarily persuasion. They had a million people mobilized to go door to door around the country to persuade people of the benefits of having a small family, and in urban areas, a one-child family. And they then decided to tack on coercion. In my opinion, the coercion backfired and was unnecessary. They could have done it without coercion. And it created real controversy, not only for China, but for the whole field of population concern that coercion might be used. And certainly, as we've seen in Europe, and many of the Asian Tigers, coercion is not necessary. They got voluntary changes going on in many societies. And what can speed up those changes is effective role modeling, which means you have to have a charismatic role model in front of a large audience who can change what people see as normal. If I'm growing up in northern Nigeria, and my father beats my mother, and I have ten siblings, that's going to be my norm until something intervenes to change my view of what is normal. And so as we've seen in our own society, with mass media, very charismatic celebrities, as well as fictional characters can change what people perceive as normal. And they are, in many ways, more effective than having top down authorities like government figures dictating what people should do.
Nandita Bajaj 21:59
Right. And Bill, you've mentioned that violence against women in its various forms is the most pervasive public health and human rights issue. What are some forms of violence against girls and women that you've seen in countries PMC has worked in?
Bill Ryerson 22:12
All over the map. Domestic violence alone affects about a third of women in the world. So as a public health issue, it's probably the most prevalent. But we've seen in many countries we're working in in Africa, forced child marriage, which is a form of violence. Marriage by abduction. So for example, in southern Ethiopia, and in some other countries, it is still not uncommon for a man to grab a young say teenage girl off the street and rape her. And then to save the family name, she's forced to marry him. So we address this issue in some of our programs in Ethiopia. And we got a letter in response to one of these programs from a woman in Oromia, Ethiopia saying, "Thank you for addressing the issue of marriage by abduction. Our own daughter was abducted on her way to school at age fourteen, and ended up married as a result. We have been afraid to send our twelve-year-old girls to school for fear the same thing would happen to them. When your program addressed this issue through the character Wubalem, our entire village, most of whom were listening, came together and agreed to enforce the law against marriage by abduction, which we hadn't realized existed. And now it's safe for our twelve-year-old girls to go to school." So that is a big issue. I mean, there are millions of girls who are not adult, not old enough to give consent or are forced into marriage. Female genital mutilation is very common in many of the countries we're working in, where the mutilation of the genitals is done in order to make sex painful for the woman in order to prevent her from perhaps straying away from her husband. In some countries, there are uniquely horrible forms of really torture. Breast ironing in Cameroon to make girls less sexually attractive because they want to preserve their virginity. So it is an issue that not only is a human rights violation, but it also is an issue that affects fertility rate, because if you're in a relationship with an abusive partner, it is very hard to negotiate contraceptive use or anything else. You're basically doing whatever you're told to avoid more beatings. So stopping violence against women is critically important. And there's some very interesting research on how to reduce tendencies towards violence among couples that are in conflict. So one of our advisory board members, S.D. Shantinath, had worked with a program called PREP Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program. That's an American program for couples who are involved in violent relationships that helps them learn empathetic communication. So before arguing or dehumanizing the other person, they learn to repeat what the other person said and make sure they understand it. And then they can argue the issue as opposed to dehumanization. And so we actually had her train our team in Ethiopia in how to incorporate this kind of empathetic communications into the character's dialogue so that they would become role models for the whole nation in how to reduce violence because there's violence in so many relationships. So at any rate, it's a big issue.
Nandita Bajaj 25:26
Yeah, and I really liked the connection you've also made between misogyny and this violence against girls and women. And we talk about that a lot in the different types coercive pronatalism that are at play, you know, with piety and virginity, and purity of women, but then also power over women because of their reproductive capacity and girls. But the connection that you are making, that we're also making is, not only is it a violation of human and reproductive rights, it's also directly connected to fertility rate.
Population growth is actually happening on the backs of those with the least personal and reproductive autonomy.
And that's why we feel so strongly that we really need to get past a lot of the denialism that's in culture around population issues. So I really value the examples that you've shared.
Bill Ryerson 26:23
When you think of a child bride, take northern Nigeria. It's not uncommon to find twelve, thirteen, fourteen-year-old girls married to a much older man. They have no idea about human rights or women's rights. They are being brought up by their husbands, and they're doing whatever they're told. And so in fact, it's critically important not only to build their self-efficacy, but also to change men's attitudes about masculinity. And this is a broader issue than just human relationships. So I think much of what the world faces is the issue of dominance, and certainly, Western civilization. And for that matter, most civilizations have prided themselves on dominating nature.
And converting wilderness into farmland or into nice cities. And this whole idea that we can dominate nature and not live sustainably, and that we can dominate other people, and that we can go to war with other countries that we have a reason to want something they own, is, I think, our biggest weakness as humanity.
Nandita Bajaj 27:28
Yeah. Well said. We agree wholeheartedly.
Alan Ware 27:31
So there's a common perception that we just need to expand access to contraception, and that will help women choose smaller families. And while we certainly agree that two hundred and twenty-five million women that don't have and don't want a pregnancy, and don't have contraception access should be getting it. But as you've noted, that was amazing, only one-tenth of 1% of women not using modern contraception site lack of access is the reason, which is quite surprising to me. But what are some of the reasons that you found for why women are not using modern contraceptives?
Bill Ryerson 28:05
We've analyzed the answers to this question in the demographic and health surveys that have been done worldwide - about ninety-five countries have carried this out more or less every five years. And so they ask if people are using contraception and if not, they ask why not in almost every survey. And what they have found is number one, the reason people give is wanting more children. So desired larger family size is a key driver, which makes sense. However, in terms of sustainability, in many countries, particularly in West Africa, desired fertility is above actual fertility. So to use the most extreme example, Niger has a fertility rate of 7.6 children per woman. And so that's the average number of children born to a woman during her lifetime. And when women are asked what they think is the ideal number, they say eleven and men say thirteen. So building more clinics is not going to change that. You can use family planning and still have thirteen children. And if the men are the decision makers, they hold a lot of sway. So the same thing in Africa's most populous country, Nigeria. Fertility rate is 5.7. Women want seven and men want nine. So this is one of the reasons these countries are mired in poverty, and the demographic dividend concept of the Asian Tigers moving to smaller fertility and, as a result, having money left over at the end of the month that wasn't used for food, housing, and clothing, that built capital in the marketplaces and then allowed to businesses to borrow and expand and it allowed growth in employment, drove up wages, created a middle class, created taxable income that the government could use to build infrastructure like roads and schools - all of which increase economic productivity. Now that concept is well understood. But in countries where large family norms have not changed, people are mired in poverty because of it. So helping them understand both the health and economic consequences of large families is critically important and to create popular models who make it okay to have a smaller family. But then after you've take off the people who want more children, the top reasons given by those who don't want to pregnancy, the the two hundred and twenty-five million you mentioned, they vary by country, but they're more or less in this order: opposition, personal, spousal, or religious, and fear of health effects. So in some places, particularly in some churches, you can find out the belief of the priest, that condoms increase your chance of getting AIDS, and that you're better off having unprotected sex, because, for reasons that few people can explain, they're opposed to artificial methods of contraception. There are rumors that the IUD will migrate up and stop the heart from beating. And a lot of this misinformation is intentionally spread. And we know in our own society, how easy it is to spread misinformation. So people who have opposition to family planning for whatever reason are doing this. And so these are the the top reasons. And then something that sort of underlies all of this is fatalism. And this was the number one reason given in Pakistan, "It is up to God how many children I have. I have no say in the matter." So the issue is, in part, building self-efficacy, giving people the belief that they do have the right to determine number, and then to take steps to achieve that number, as opposed to throwing up their hands and being fatalistic. So as you said, those are often more than half those cultural and informational factors of the reasons given for nonuse among those who are not using contraception and don't want a pregnancy. While in most countries less than 1% cite lack of access, less than 1% site cost. Now, cost might become more of a factor or lack of access, if those other barriers were removed. And so it's not unimportant to expand access to family planning methods, and the range of methods and accessibility of clinics and so on. But the critical need first is to remove misinformation about safety and effectiveness and to help people understand that whether their husband is opposed or not, they have the right to take steps to determine their own family life.
Alan Ware 32:27
So you would have those in your programs where some character thinks, "I can't use this contraception because of XYZ," and the other character corrects?
Bill Ryerson 32:37
Exactly. I would say in terms of what we're addressing with regard to planning one's family life, these are the major issues we're addressing - this misinformation and the opposition. I mean, for example, in northern Nigeria, which is conservative, Islamic region of Nigeria, some religious leaders speak out against family planning. Some support it. It's not like the Catholic Church, you know, it varies. But what we did in our program was mentioned the official finding from Al-Ahram University in Cairo, that basically said, "Well, the Qur'an was written seven hundred years ago and predated modern contraceptives, it does command women to breastfeed their infants for at least two years. And if particularly in low nutrition society, a pregnancy occurs, the breastfeeding may be interrupted." Therefore, the Qur'an inherently endorses family planning, and that's an official finding. So when religious leaders in northern Nigeria found that out, they said, "Oh, good to know." So, you know, we can reach not only the public, but leaders who may also be listening to the serialized dramas. And in the case of that program, 71% of the population in Kano, Kaduna, Katsina and Sokoto states reported listening to the program at least weekly. And at eleven clinics that asked new family planning adopters why they had come, 67% of them named the program.
Alan Ware 34:04
And that was in northern Nigeria?
Bill Ryerson 34:09
Yes. We've done several programs in northern Nigeria.
Nandita Bajaj 34:11
Yeah. And the fact that you shared about the kind of embedded messaging in the Qur'an about family planning and birth spacing through breastfeeding for a couple of years. That was also reinforced by Dr. S. Y. Quraishi. He recently did a podcast episode with us. He wrote this book based on 50 years of census research to show that a lot of the information out there about Muslim high fertility rates are being driven by what's being said in the Qur'an. He went and analyzed all of the different verses of the Qur'an himself, compared it to the data of was the fertility really higher, and he was looking at specifically in India, because that's where a lot of the nationalistic sentiment is being raised up again, you know, by the Hindu nationalists. And he literally said the exact same thing - is, it's not just a propaganda that's spread across Hindu nationalists, but a lot of Muslims believe that too. And so there's just misinformation overload all across the countries. You mix that up with illiteracy rates being so high, and people are more likely to believe what's being shared, you know, culturally in terms of social norms.
Bill Ryerson 35:28
Yeah, you know, when you look at the global data, just under 50% of the world's population is still illiterate.
And so putting out brochures and informational pieces is not all that effective in reaching them. But religious leaders, community leaders, spouses, and charismatic characters, can all have huge influences. And in fact, the charismatic characters can have influences on the real leader. So-
We have seen this in many of the countries where we're working.
Nandita Bajaj 35:59
Yeah, that's great. And, of course, the recurring theme that I'm hearing come up in your work which overlaps so much with our work is social norms and conformity. The pressure to conform to social norms in order to be seen as quote unquote, normal. And just like you said, if the desired fertility rate within a particular community is seven, then you ask how many kids she wants? And she'll say something around that number.
So, you know, we see that a lot in challenging pronatalist beliefs around the role that pronatalist pressures play as a result of religious pressures, political pressures, ethnocentrism, and all of the different ways in which people are being manipulated, including being given misinformation about contraceptives. And, you know, we're trying to go even a little bit deeper, especially within the North American context, or the Western context, is at Population Balance, one of our major concerns is the social pressure that girls and women face to accept the singular role of motherhood to the exclusion of other roles in life. And sometimes that shows up in the stigmatization of infertility, childlessness, people who make other family choices such as adoption, or people who choose not to have children, or have small families in communities where the large family is the norm. Are you also engaging through PMC programming to challenge some of these other pronatalist social pressures, such as destigmatizing childlessness, or infertility, etc.?
Bill Ryerson 37:45
Yes. And back to conformism. When you think about the role of conformism in human societies, it has a very important role. In any early human society, one conformed in order to be accepted, not be ostracized, which could be a death sentence, to find a mate, to find a job - and all of those things are still important. But it leads to maladaptation, where big institutions like churches start using that sense of "you have to do this to fit in" to get people to follow what they want. And so changing concepts with regard to such things as choosing to be childfree, which my wife and I did in the 1970s, and got written up in the newspaper because we're such an oddball couple for having made that decision and made it public. And infertility and other issues, you know, is something that I see a lot in very traditional societies, where a man has the right to leave his wife and take a new one if she doesn't produce only child, but doesn't produce a son. And, you know, changing the whole concept of what is the relationship for and what are the rights of the woman to have a fulfilling life is critically important, and to get men on board with that, because in many tradition-bound societies, men see their role as being the taskmaster.
So indeed, in each country, and this goes back to the Sabido Methodology, we have to start where the audience is. So in a place like Nigeria, we wouldn't necessarily do a program about the childfree lifestyle as a starting point, because when people do change attitudes and behavior, it's often in baby steps. So our transitional characters take baby steps, and they make mistakes along the way and suffer consequences and then they get back on the path towards positive and healthful behavior. But we, you know, as I said, when we worked in Sudan, we're not parachuting Gloria Steinem into Sudan, even though she's on our program advisory board, because radios would be turned off.
And in fact, the head of radio Omdurman was very upset that his wife was listening to the program and asking him some tough questions. And he wanted to take it off the air and the Minister of Communication said, "No, this is in line with Sudan's policies, you'll keep it on there." So, you know, it's very important to move an audience at a rate that does not create backlash.
And it's one of the great things about the Sabido Methodology is we've never had controversy, we've never had public outcry over the content because they see it as being about their lives. And they learn from the characters. They're aware they're learning from the characters, but they're not objecting because they're being entertained, and there are lots of cliffhangers and love triangles, and all the things that keep people tuning in over months and years. But we're not trying to move them from A to Z in one step. And this is really the mistake some people in communications have made, and some people in reproductive health have. Well, let's start where Gloria Steinem would start and present this to the people of Sudan.
And it just can create backlash. So we really see moving in baby steps is a far better way to bring about permanent change.
Nandita Bajaj 41:13
That makes so much sense.
Alan Ware 41:15
Yeah, you had noted earlier how you're trying to redefine masculinity and femininity, which is definitely a part of pushing back against some of those pronatalist social pressures. And I'm wondering what what examples of programming PMC has had that's helped change those rigid gender roles.
Bill Ryerson 41:32
There are more than I can tell you, but I'll just give you one statistic. One of our programs in Ethiopia modeled a woman running for higher office. And the storyline came against the backdrop of a baseline survey that showed only 33% of men thought it was even appropriate for a woman to seek higher office. That program pulled in half the population of the country. By the end of the program, male listeners had doubled their acceptance of women running for higher office to 66%.
So there are many examples both at the family level and at the societal level that we've built into the storylines to show that women have not only equal capability, but equal rights to achieve leadership roles.
Nandita Bajaj 42:18
Yeah, those are really staggering stats. One of the strongest perpetuation of pronatalism comes through religion, religious doctrine. And you've spoken at length about that in terms of spreading misinformation about contraceptives, etc. But religion is also very invested in maintaining traditional gender roles of masculinity and femininity and heteronormative relationships - men and women get married so that they can have large families. How have you worked with religious authorities, if at all?
Bill Ryerson 42:52
There's an interesting story. We worked in Papua New Guinea with two programs. And there is a Catholic nun who was known for walking from village to village in the mountains of Papua New Guinea with a backpack open on her back full of condoms, and people would come out and help themselves. And she was called in by her superiors and challenged on this. And the response was, "Father, I have seen nothing," because it was behind her. There are religious leaders who realize that the theology about large family size with the idea of growing the membership, the paying membership, is not sustainable. And so some of them work from the inside. In Ethiopia, we've done a long campaign with religious leaders, both Orthodox Christian and Muslim leaders, around the issue of FGM - female genital mutilation. And with great success, these leaders who have attended workshops we've held, have then gone to their followings and preach to them about the fact that there is no basis in either Islam or Christianity for this practice. It is really one done to suppress women. So we have also worked with Islamic leaders in in northern Nigeria, as I mentioned in storyline, but also directly with religious leaders there to help them understand the Qur'anic endorsement of family planning. We're not primarily an advocacy organization, but certainly we recognize that religious leaders and village leaders both are very important for bringing about permanent change in health behaviors.
Nandita Bajaj 44:33
Definitely. I mean, with this such a large majority of global population being religiously affiliated somehow, that's, you know, one of the largest forms of socialization that is happening in culture. Have you ever had any kind of backlash from any of your shows coming directly from religious authorities?
Bill Ryerson 44:54
No major backlash. We've had one person speak up. This was in Nigeria, and his superior informed him that this was an official Qur'anic finding and he straightened up, but there was no public protests. We've never had public controversy about any of the shows. Well, even in the US. You know, we did a show that became the longest running program in the history of the network, Hulu, dealing with teen pregnancy among American Hispanics called East Los High. And by the way, if you're a subscriber to Hulu, you can still watch this - sixty some episodes that are in their archives. And in season one, the character Jessie has an unwanted pregnancy and she wants to go to college, and after hemming and hawing and getting counseling over and over from a lovely Planned Parenthood worker finally decides to have an abortion. There was no controversy around this. Because it was her decision. We weren't telling the audience what they should do.
Alan Ware 45:50
So we've heard from many people seeking social change, that giving people information and data is never enough. And that the power of stories, metaphors, images, simplifying frames of understanding - can be very powerful. Now you are trained as a biologist, right? And that involves a much more objective and personal methods of knowing and learning about the world. Were you surprised at the power of story to change people's attitudes and behavior?
Bill Ryerson 46:19
Totally. I can tell you when I first heard about Sabido's family planning Telenovela, I laughed, I said, "Soap operas are horrible programs. Why would anybody do that - this is a serious subject, you need good information." And like most academically trained people, I thought, you just give people the information they need, and they'll act on it. Well, when you think about An Inconvenient Truth, what it gave people was a lot of information, tried to make them into climate scientists, and left a lot of depressed people who had no idea of, therefore, what do we do?
And what is much more important than, although it's not unimportant to educate people, what's much more important is to help people see on a personal level what they can do, and to see role models who help them walk through the changes they need to make so they have a path forward. And so on the population issue, we're not trying to educate our audiences about global demographic trends. We're talking about family life, and what creates health and happiness and rights for people in their own lives. And the same thing is true with this. Just giving people information, while motivating to people like me, is not motivating to a lot of people. And in fact, information inherently for some people is quite boring. So I think what I've, more than anything, brought to the Sabido Methodology is the scientific measure of its impact. And showing that, in fact, there's no more cost effective strategy. Even though a two year serialized drama is expensive, on a cost per behavior change, there's nothing more cost effective.
Alan Ware 47:54
Right. That power of story to create good and also bad throughout history. I think in Rwanda, right, the Hutus used various stories through their radio, I'm not sure if they were using soap operas, but they were definitely in the process of dehumanization of the Tutsis.
Bill Ryerson 48:13
You know, they weren't using soap operas, but they did dehumanization. And you know, American television does the same thing. We glorify use of guns for solving problems. And - Arnold Schwarzenegger - machine gun carrying-type characters are often glorified and while the television industry has been constantly saying, "No, no, people know it's fiction. It's not affecting their behavior." Albert Bandura did multiple research projects on the influence of violent programming on observers, and what he found was you and I can watch the Godfather and not turn into a serial killer, because we have positive, offsetting parental role models. But if we lack that, if we're neglected, if we are really in a psychological situation, where we're looking for something to hang onto, those people can be hugely influenced by negative role modeling. As we see with copycat shootings in this country.
So he became a thorn in the side of Hollywood with his research that showed very clearly that violent programming leads to some level of violence among observers.
Nandita Bajaj 49:20
Yeah, the other thing I wanted to mention was norms-shifting as you've spoken about, you know, it's happening all the time. For example, in a previous episode we had with Dr. Sarah Conly, she talked about how this idea of absolute autonomy is quite flawed, and that we're always being influenced by something or the other, whether it's through family, culture, media, social media, politics, religion, etc. And while some of these influences can be quite positive, as they are in so many of your shows, others, like Alan mentioned, can be manipulative in that they're trying to get us to do something that may not be in our best interest, such as the rampant consumerism.
Bill Ryerson 50:01
Yes, advertising is intended to get people to buy products.
Nandita Bajaj 50:05
Exactly. And that's norm shifting happening left, right and center, right. It's not like we're only being manipulated, sometimes. We're being manipulated all the time. The question is, is it to cultivate self efficacy? Or is it to get us to do something that may not be in our best interest? It sounds like you have not received any backlash in that regard from viewers and listeners, but has anyone talked about your programming being perceived as manipulating people with any hidden agendas?
Bill Ryerson 50:40
Certainly, there are questions of are we doing mind control? Are we trying to manipulate the audience? And so in fact, Sabido went to a team of ethicist when he started this methodology and said, "What is the sort of ethical conclusion about modeling positive behavior in an entertainment program?" And the conclusion was, if you're opening the blinders that people have because cultural realities, and showing real consequences of different behaviors, and showing how to make a transition, you're actually operating in a very ethical way. If you're only saying, "Drink Coke and nothing else," you're not opening people's blinders, you're trying to narrow their choices. So I think what we're doing is the opposite of manipulation. But it also raises the question of how do we address the rampant consumerism in the West. And I've often said, I'm not sure if people would stop to watch a recycling soap opera. But there certainly are ways and we've done this in several of our programs that we can address environmental and consumption behaviors in the context of a show that's mostly about family life. Family life, love, and romance make for good stories, whereas some environmental issues will cause people's eyes to glaze over-
If you're trying to entertain them with something like carbon dioxide. So it's important to incorporate that where we can. One of the issues in this society is we have decided that broadcast channels are to be owned by private enterprises, and they can make money selling products. And as a result of that, we're up against networks that want to sell those products or want to influence the audience to buy those products. And so coming out with an anti-consumer message inherently is a bit difficult. But certainly what we have done in a number of programs is address some aspects of consumption in the context of a program. I'll give you just two examples. In Western Democratic Republic of the Congo, we partnered with Jane Goodall Institute to model giving up consumption of bushmeat as a way of helping preserve biodiversity. And that was quite successful with the audience. And in Rwanda, with a program that dealt primarily with reproductive health, we also addressed reforestation, and one of the characters who had originally been opposed to family planning and wouldn't let his wife use family planning, found that the family was outgrowing his ability to feed them with the farm he had. So he cut trees in the national park on a hillside behind his property and he caused a landslide that wiped out his house and killed one of his children. And then he reformed and he replanted the area. And the Ministry of Environment was very excited about the storyline. And there was research on the buyers of tree seedlings, finding that 11% of them, when asked why they've come to buy tree seedlings named that program. So we can have influence on environmental issues. And we recognize that since consumption is the other half of the equation in terms of human impact on the planet, this is a huge area of need, and needs a lot of thought as to how to build in simpler, sustainable lives into programming where we're modeling for a large audience.
Alan Ware 54:06
Yeah. Now you tried - most of your shows by far are in the developing countries. You mentioned the East Los High Hulu show about mainly teenage pregnancy. Have you been trying other initiatives focusing on over-developed countries and with these kinds of consumption messages you've just mentioned about?
Bill Ryerson 54:23
We have. We have not had other shows on the air in the US until this past month. So we are now doing a whole bunch of different projects and self-producing two programs. So one of them, now on the air as a podcast, is called Crossing The Line. And it's about the lives of women who must cross state lines to access abortion. So that is clearly a growing issue in the US. And then second, Gloria Steinem is working with us on a program that will be another self-produced podcast called State of Women that will go on the air in November. We also have television serial dramas set in places like Harlem and Appalachia and Texas. We have docudramas and documentaries, a whole bunch of projects that are in development that are seeking distributors and/or funders to help them become reality. The US is a fragmented and very competitive media market. So it's a hard place to reach a huge percentage of the population with any broadcast but we see the importance of doing this in part because many of these programs get exported all over the world. So I've had people in Uganda telling me that they are watching East Los High, because you can buy it in pirate video shops. And I went into one of those pirate video shops when I was in Kampala. And asked the man in the store, "How is it selling?" And he said, "It's about even with Desperate Housewives."
Alan Ware 56:00
Wow, that's pretty popular. Yeah, that would be great to develop more storylines that deal with overconsumption in the rich countries.
Bill Ryerson 56:10
We've actually explored with a number of institutions, including Stanford University, doing a project that addresses climate-related behaviors. Of course, addressing family size is a climate-related behavior. You know, Brian O'Neill at University of Colorado found, to summarize his very detailed analysis, that roughly a quarter of what is necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change could be achieved through smaller family norms and promotion of family planning. So it's not unimportant to address this as part of the climate issue. But there are many other consumption behaviors that need a lot of information and role modeling for the audience on how do they achieve this. And why should they.
Alan Ware 56:54
And that they can be just as happy and satisfied without waste-producing status markers. So as a last question, what keeps you going over the decades you've spent working, how many - fifty years on this issue, sustainable population?
Bill Ryerson 57:10
This month mark fifty-one years in this field, and I guess what keeps me going is two things. One is, we're seeing success. And you know, in some countries, and I'll mention again, Ethiopia, in one two year program, we saw fertility rate drop nationwide by an entire child. So we can see real success, oh, it's rewarding. And we know from the tens of thousands of letters and text messages we've received, it's helping people in their lives. And so it's very rewarding work. It's also the case that there's a huge distance to go. We're not reaching enough people, we need to be in far more countries, we need to be on the air constantly, and not just whenever we land a contract or grant in a particular country. So there's a huge challenge ahead of us in order to use this strategy to bring about sustainability. And when you think about it, there is no issue more important than sustainability if the system collapses.
You know, it's not only an environmental issue, it's a human rights issue and a public health issue. It will create untold suffering. So it's not only urgent, but critically important for the future of the planet. And I think one of the things I hope will happen in the next few years is that we'll partner with larger institutions and be in more countries on the air at any one time.
Alan Ware 58:33
Yeah, I've heard it mentioned that there's a entertainment-education institute might be developed in Mexico, is it?
Bill Ryerson 58:40
We are working with Argos Media Group and to develop a training institute for writers and producers in the use of entertainment-education. And so we're very excited about that. And once people have gone through this training, as we've seen with our own writers for East Los High, they then are not afraid to address issues. In fact, the issues make it more real to the audience, more interesting to the audience. What they have to avoid is hitting people over the head with issues and making it too issue heavy and scaring an audience away.
But once they know how to do it in a way that both is entertaining and brings about positive change, we think there'll be more people doing it. So Argos produces a lot of people who end up going into the major networks in Mexico. And at some point, this institute, we expect, will also expand and be more global in its reach, but it's just getting started in Mexico.
Nandita Bajaj 59:37
Wow, that sounds obviously that you've found a nice mix of strategies that are so effective in creating positive social change. It just seems like it's a matter of really scaling up the work that you are doing, instead of reinventing the wheel and trying other strategies. We're gonna have to keep talking to you beyond this podcast episode, you know, how can we bring some of the work you're doing into other organizations that are population and consumption and sustainability oriented so that we can become a much more united front on these issues. Wow, what a terrific interview that was Bill, thank you so much.
Alan Ware 1:01:03
Well, really appreciate your doing the interview, happy to participate in this, and happy to help other organizations working on population and sustainability issues understand the importance of storytelling, because all of us can do more. And we've seen some great examples of humor and other forms of storytelling in this field, but there's also a lot of hand wringing and overload of information and it doesn't do a whole lot of good. So anyway, delighted to do this.
Nandita Bajaj 1:01:38
Thank you very much.
Alan Ware 1:01:40
Yeah, thank you.
Bill Ryerson 1:01:41
Thank you.
Alan Ware 1:01:43
That's it for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. Visit populationbalance.org to learn more. And to share feedback or guests recommendations, write to us using the contact form on our site or by emailing us at podcast at population balance.org. If you feel inspired by our work, please consider supporting us using the donate button. Also, to help expand our listenership, Please consider rating us on whichever podcast platform you use.
Nandita Bajaj 1:02:10
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for all your efforts in helping us all shrink toward abundance.
