Scenarios from Africa Team

“Scenarios from Africa is a forum where different members of the AIDS-response community get together for open consultation and exchange.” Parfait Hounnou, Fondation Agnes Marie, Burkina Faso

“We created a kind of mini-Africa in this [2008] international jury, with people of more than ten nationalities. And in this mini-Africa we had time to get to know one another. We now all know that we have friends in many African countries, and that they are loyal friends. I remember at the jury three years ago when [one of the National Coordinators] was going through a tough time personally, and the jurors supported him with a lot of solidarity. ... We manage to spread that same spirit of solidarity through the films, and that’s extraordinary.” Dr. Abdon Goudjo of Benin, FCI/AFD Technical Advisor to the National AIDS Control Program of Congo/Brazzaville

“This ability of Scenarios from Africa to bring people together was at first the most surprising thing, and now the most frequently observed thing. When the process was launched in 1997, we first saw this phenomenon when juries were brought together to meet and to debate. And then we also saw it in the organization of the contest – a collaborative approach involving different organizations.
     First of all, it helps people to meet one another for the first time and to become familiar with each other. And then, it creates synergies and sharing that lead to collaborative relationships between groups that got to know each other during the Scenarios activities – relationships that continue beyond the Scenarios framework.
     This process creates relationships not only at the national level, but also internationally. It helps us to get a better sense of what is going on in other countries, in English-speaking and in French-speaking Africa.
     It’s really important because it creates a forum for exchange where we can draw conclusions together, identify common ground, and then start to contribute to producing resources that correspond to the realities of the epidemic, to what is happening on the ground and what must be done about it, as opposed to creating resources based on mere theories.” Gary Engelberg, Africa Consultants International, Senegal

“We’ve kept up friendships as if between brothers and sisters. Ever since I got to know Scenarios from Africa, I’ve stayed in touch with people from the national and international juries who always write and who are interested in how I am, how my family is. When I tell them that things aren’t going so well, they’re always there to give me moral support. It’s been an opportunity for me to create relationships here in the country and internationally that have lasted for more than ten years, and those relationships extend well beyond the context of Scenarios from Africa.” A young woman living with HIV who plays a key role in the Scenarios process

"We are a big family of hope." Moulaye Ismael Dicko, CESPA, Scenarios National Coordinator in Mali

The Team

The essence of SCENARIOS FROM AFRICA is broad-based partnership. The project focuses on generating, maintaining and continually expanding a network of singularly committed partners from highly diverse fields and on fostering synergies between them. Women and people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) play a central role in all aspects of the SCENARIOS process.

The Contest Teams

The Contest Participants and Winners

The Jurors

The Film Production and Dubbing Teams

Film Distribution Partners

Evaluation Partners

Funders and Sponsors

Project Coordination

The Contest Teams

In each of the core project countries, Global Dialogues designates a SCENARIOS FROM AFRICA National Coordinator (NC). The NCs are social entrepreneurs chosen for their dedication, professional excellence, integrity and partnership-oriented approach to the response to HIV/AIDS.

The SCENARIOS contests are implemented at the national level by teams of primary partner organizations carefully selected by the NCs, who are completely sovereign in their choice of local partners, with the exception of the required centrality of women and PLWHA in each country. Those primary partner organizations, in turn, mobilize their own outreach workers, local partners, media contacts, allies in state bodies, and schools to reach out to contest participants.

In 2007/8, a total of 1,576 organizations took part in implementing the SCENARIOS FROM AFRICA contest.

Ever since the first SCENARIOS contest in 1997, invaluable support has been provided by individuals and organizations who come on board proactively and on a volunteer basis to mobilize contest participants in their area. In the 2007/8 contest, this was the case, for example, in Equatorial Guinea (US Embassy, Spanish and French Cultural Centers), Italy (where African immigrants took part thanks to the Servizio Sanitario Regionale Emilia-Romagna), and Cape Verde, The Gambia, Ghana and South Africa (all Peace Corps).

International media and internet initiatives on behalf of the contest help to support the National Coordinators in their efforts and to ensure that the contest reaches young people all across the continent. Key partners include the popular youth magazine Planète Jeunes (Youth Planet), TV5Monde, Radio France Internationale, CRIPS (the French organization that created the Scenarios concept), the UK NGO AIDS Consortium, and the Communication Initiative.

The Contest Participants and Winners

Over 145,000 young Africans have participated in the SCENARIOS contests since 1997. They come from 47 African countries, ranged in age from 5 to 24 when they created their contest entries, and live in rural, urban and peri-urban areas.

Former contest winners – some of whom are now talented young professionals in SCENARIOS-relevant fields – are playing an increasingly important role in various phases of the project. They have proven to be highly effective members of contest teams, helping out both at community level and in the media. Contest juries include more and more former winners, as do SCENARIOS film production, dubbing and distribution teams. Perhaps most importantly, many former winners see themselves as permanent SCENARIOS Ambassadors, constantly raising awareness of the process and audio-visual outputs wherever their paths might take them – from Zambia to a university in Algeria, from Burkina Faso to film work in Paris and London, from secondary school student to a position as Magistrate Judge, fighting for women’s rights all the while….

Please click here to see a poster created for the 2004 International AIDS Conference in Bangkok. The poster provides an overview of the SCENARIOS FROM AFRICA process and shines a spotlight on the important role played by 1997 contest winner Olga Kiswendsida Ouedraogo of Burkina Faso.

The Jurors

The winners of the SCENARIOS contests are selected at the national and international levels by juries made up of people living with HIV, specialists in audio-visual production and other communications fields, experts in the areas of HIV prevention or treatment and care, activists, and young people (especially winners of previous contests).

So far, representatives of over 500 different organizations have served as jurors. Those individuals often point out that SCENARIOS jury duty is particularly conducive to the development of lasting professional contacts and synergies, frequently founded in friendship.

The Film Production and Dubbing Teams

Specialists from a wide range of artistic and academic fields – sociology, public health, psychology, anthropology, communications and media studies… – collaborate on the adaptation of an original scenario. The adapted script is then story-boarded, exhaustively pre-tested and repeatedly amended, often over a period of several months, with the help of community-based organizations, especially organizations of people living with HIV.

Then, the region’s most celebrated filmmakers, working in tandem with African producers, direct teams made up of some of Africa's top acting talent and most accomplished technicians to create the SCENARIOS films. Leading musicians and other celebrities are often involved. Wherever possible, the young author plays a central role in the process, serving as on-set advisor, acting in the films or even co-directing.

Over the past several years, and with a view to responding both to priority recommendations of external evaluators and to expressed demand from SCENARIOS film users across the continent, special emphasis has been placed on dubbing the films not only into English, French and Portuguese, but also into key African languages. The Portuguese version is produced for free thanks to the generous ongoing support of the Lusophone world’s finest dubbing studio – Santa Claus Audiovisual, located near Lisbon.

At first, responding effectively to the need for African-language versions of the SCENARIOS films was not an easy task, as the requisite technical capacity either did not exist or was not yet sufficiently developed to produce high-quality lip-synch dubs. Therefore, SCENARIOS FROM AFRICA has invested heavily in the development of professional dubbing capacity in Benin, Burkina Faso, Congo, Ghana, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda and Senegal. Members of the SCENARIOS dub teams in those countries report that the skills and reputation they have gained from producing local-language versions of the SCENARIOS films are such that they are now frequently called upon to dub other audio-visual tools on a variety of development-related topics.

Film Distribution Partners

Broadcast copies of the SCENARIOS FROM AFRICA films are made available to television stations, always on a non-profit, rights-free basis. This process has been facilitated by a number of organizations, including the Commonwealth Secretariat, the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association, Television Trust for the Environment (all United Kingdom), CFI (France), Abraço (Portugal) and Reporters sans Frontières (France and international).

The multi-language DVD sets of the films are created by long-time SCENARIOS partner and friend Alex Martin and his colleagues at Layer Zero in Sutton, Surrey, UK.

Two primary strategies are used to ensure that the SCENARIOS DVDs are widely distributed at community level in Africa. First of all, shipments of the films are sent to SCENARIOS National Coordinators, who then get the DVDs into good hands in their respective countries. And secondly, shipments are sent to the headquarters of organizations and businesses in Europe and the United States for subsequent distribution to their offices in Africa. Examples of distribution partners from the world of development include US Peace Corps, the Swiss Tropical Institute, the GTZ (Germany), Abraço (Portugal-based, distributing the films across Lusophone Africa and to African diaspora populations in Brazil), CRIPS (France-based, helping to deliver the films across Francophone Africa), the Royal Tropical Institute of the Netherlands (KIT), PLAN International, the International AIDS Alliance, the Red Cross, IPPF and UNAIDS and its constituent members. Businesses that provide copies of the SCENARIOS DVDs to their offices across Africa include several corporate members of the French umbrella organization SIDA-Entreprises, Shell and Air France.

Support for shipping the SCENARIOS films has been provided by DHL and TNT (UK).

Evaluation Partners

With the exception of external evaluation (directed in 2008/9 by independent consultant Sié Offi Somé of Burkina Faso), SCENARIOS qualitative and quantitative evaluation activities are driven and informed in an ongoing, interactive manner by those who play the central roles in the SCENARIOS process: contest participants, members of the contest and selection teams and their organizations, and people who use the films at community level. Advice on the conceptualization of evaluative tools is provided by specialists from a number of academic fields.

Funders and Sponsors

Primary financial support for SCENARIOS FROM AFRICA is provided by Comic Relief (UK), HIVOS (Netherlands), and ArtAction (Singapore).

Additional sources of funding since the project’s inception include: The Department for International Development (UK), GTZ (Germany), Cordaid (Netherlands), Emory University (Atlanta, USA), PLAN International (Burkina Faso), The National Lottery Charities Board (UK), The Pfizer Foundation (USA), Shell, UNDP, UNFPA, the IMF Civic Program, Canal + Horizons (France), and the British High Commission (Ghana).

The total cash value of in-kind support provided to SCENARIOS FROM AFRICA since 1997 surpasses by far the amount of actual funding received. Sources of in-kind support have included: Abraço (Portugal), Academy for Educational Development (USA), Accor (France), Action Duplication (USA), Africa Consultants International (Senegal), Africare (Tanzania), Air Afrique, Air Burkina, Air France, amnesty international (Togo), Association African Solidarité (Burkina Faso), Belgian Technical Cooperation, Brakina (Burkina Faso), British Council, Catholic Relief Services (Senegal, Burkina Faso, Tanzania), Cassero (Bologna, Italy), CFAO (France), CFI (France), Clinton Foundation (Tanzania), Commonwealth Broadcasting Association, Commonwealth Secretariat, Creative Associates International (Benin and USA), CRIPS (France), DED (German Development Service), Deutsche AIDS Stiftung (Germany), DHL (UK, Portugal and USA), Duplication Company (UK), Edward Thompson Group (UK), Emory University (USA), FedEx Kinkos (USA), Fine Cut Facilities (UK), Focus on Young Adults (Washington D.C.), French Cultural Centers (Burkina Faso, Equatorial Guinea), Futures Group International (Mali), Humphries Video Services (UK), Initiative Jeunes (Niger), ITN (UK), Johns Hopkins University Center for Communication Programs (Ghana), Kellmatt (UK), Médecins sans frontières, Mister Video (Portugal), National Alliance Against AIDS (ANCS; Senegal), Newcastle Sporting Club (UK), Newcastle University's Audio-Visual Centre (UK), One World TV (UK), Ouaganet (Burkina Faso), PALIH2/CCISD (Haiti/Canada), Peace Corps (USA), Planète Jeunes (France), PLAN International (Senegal, Burkina Faso), PSI, Radio France Internationale, Rainbow of California (USA), Red Cross (Senegal, Tanzania), Reuters, Royal Tropical Institute of the Netherlands (KIT), Santa Claus Audiovisual (Portugal), Servizio Sanitario Regionale Emilia-Romagna (Italy), SIDA-Entreprises (France), Spanish Cultural Center (Equatorial Guinea), Student Partnership Worldwide (Tanzania), Swatch (Switzerland), Swiss Tropical Institute, Television Trust for the Environment (UK), TNT (UK), TV5Monde (France), UNAIDS, UNICEF (Madagascar, Swaziland), UPHOLD (Uganda), UK NGO AIDS Consortium, USAID, VSO, and WHO (Burkina Faso).

Project Coordination

SCENARIOS FROM AFRICA is coordinated internationally by The Global Dialogues Trust (UK registered charity no. 1071484) from its offices in Ouagadougou, Atlanta and Newcastle.

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