About Us

Scenarios from Africa is an innovative and empowering HIV education, community mobilization and media process that has 5 main phases:

• International scriptwriting competitions, in which young people create stories for short films on HIV/AIDS and related social issues. In the six contests held since the process was launched in 1997, there have been over 150,000 participants from some 50 countries.

• The selection of winning scripts by multidisciplinary juries.

• The transformation of those ideas into fiction films by the continent’s leading directors, including four filmmakers who have won the grand prize at FESPACO, Africa’s Oscars.

• Distribution of the films in over 25 languages on television, on the Web, and on DVD. The Scenarios films reach well over 200 million viewers each year.

• And cutting-edge, scientifically rigorous analysis of the content of the contest entries. In their narratives, young people provide invaluable insights into the ways they perceive HIV/AIDS and related phenomena, including gender norms and human rights.

Through its efforts, the Scenarios team aims to strengthen local communities’ capacity to respond to HIV/AIDS, improve the lives of those most directly affected by the epidemic, and contribute to reducing the spread of the virus.

Scenarios from Africa draws its inspiration from the highly successful French project “Three thousand scenarios against a virus”, carried out by CRIPS and their associates in the early 1990s.

The Scenarios process is coordinated by Global Dialogues, a non-profit organization (UK charity no. 1071484) dedicated to promoting excellence in communication about global health.