Young Somali refugees in Ethiopia’s Dollo Ado camps produced a podcast series in 2019 aimed at reducing violence between married partners, a project led by researchers from Harvard and Addis Ababa University.
An aerial view of refugee shelters near Dollo Ado, the Ethiopian border town that hosts camps for Somali refugees, photographed in September 2011. (P. Heinlein / VOA via Wikimedia Commons, public domain) [file photo]
The series, Unite for a Better Life, was recorded in Somali in Bokolmayo camp, one of the camps near Ethiopia’s border with Somalia, VOA reported in September 2019. Eight young refugees were trained over a month to script, record and edit episodes on gender norms, healthy and unhealthy relationships, sexuality, handling conflict and khat, the stimulant leaf whose use researchers have linked to partner violence.
Theodros WoldeGiorgis, the project’s research manager, told VOA that displacement and the breakdown of social structures were driving the violence. “People are always on the move, they are suffering from displacement, they are traumatized and their troubles have been aggravated by poverty,” he said.
Podcaster Ikra Dagan said one episode urged bystanders to step in. “You don’t just stand by and look as someone is being victimized or subjected to violence. You must take action and help our sisters, mothers and even our friends,” she said. Another podcaster, Mahad Noor, said the key messages were that violence is never acceptable and that there is always an alternative.
The project brought together the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Addis Ababa University, the Swiss media group Fondation Hirondelle and Women and Health Alliance (WAHA) Ethiopia, building on research in the camps since 2014. Principal investigator Dr. Vandana Sharma said podcasts could reach far more people than the usual in-person sessions because they can be downloaded and shared from phone to phone. Belete Seyoum of the Ethiopian refugee agency’s office in the camp said he hoped they would help reduce violence.
The need was clear from earlier work in the camp. In a 2018 pilot of an in-person version of the programme, 81 percent of the women surveyed in Bokolmayo said they had experienced physical or sexual violence from a partner in their lifetime, and many said such violence was more frequent in the camp than before they fled.
The finished series ran to 16 episodes mixing drama, interviews and panel discussions. In the 2019 pilot, which reached nearly 200 households through listening centres, more than 90 percent of participants heard all 16 episodes and about 85 percent said they had changed their behaviour, citing better communication and more sharing of household work, the researchers reported. Listeners passed the messages on to an average of 14 other people. The pilot was not designed to measure whether violence itself fell over the long term.
Sources: VOA News: “New Tool to Quell Violence in Ethiopian Refugee Camps: Podcasts” (Sept. 1, 2019), International Journalists’ Network: “Researchers, Somali refugees create podcast addressing intimate partner violence”, Elrha: “Reflections and Lessons Learned at the End of the Project”, Unite for a Better Life: Podcasts to Prevent IPV, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine: Vandana Sharma presentation (2020)