The encyclopedia · Strategy & Leadership · Strategic decision · 2010
Shujaaz built a comic and radio show youth loved, embedding messages in stories
Shujaaz built a beloved comic and radio show for Kenyan youth, embedding messages in storylines they followed voluntarily.
Shujaaz / Well Told Story (Rob Burnet)
the move
In the aftermath of Kenya's 2007-2008 post-election violence, which hit dispossessed young people especially hard, Rob Burnet founded Well Told Story in 2009 to try reaching Kenya's under-25 population — roughly half the country — with information on health, savings, and civic life. The standard playbook for that kind of message was to buy space in the media channels adults controlled: government radio slots, newspaper inserts, billboards.
Those channels were reaching an audience that had largely moved on from them. Kenyan youth had their own media habits — Sheng-language slang, mobile phones, informal radio — that official campaigns weren't using, so institutional money kept buying reach on channels the target audience had effectively abandoned, producing campaigns that were technically distributed but functionally unseen.
Rather than compete for space in media young Kenyans had stopped watching, Well Told Story built its own: Shujaaz launched in February 2010 as a free monthly comic in Sheng, built around relatable fictional characters including DJ Boyie, paired with a syndicated radio show and an SMS/social media layer for fans to respond to storylines. Because the comic, radio show, and SMS platform were designed as entertainment young people would follow for its own sake — not as a wrapper around a message — behavior-change content on topics like contraception, saving money, or agricultural practices (vaccin
why it works
- Youth had abandoned traditional media, so ads on those channels were unseen.
- Shujaaz created content youth followed for entertainment, not obligation.
- Messages embedded in storylines were absorbed as a byproduct of engagement.
- High unaided recall and character recognition showed the content was genuinely loved.
what transfers
If your audience has moved to channels you don't control, build your own engaging channel and embed the message in content they follow voluntarily.
what came after
By the 2010s Shujaaz reached ~7.5M young people monthly across Kenya and Tanzania and won two International Emmy Awards. Shujaaz became a widely cited case in development communications for embedding behavior-change content inside self-sustaining, genuinely popular youth media rather than paid public-service messaging, and it expanded into agriculture, clean cooking, and civic-participation storylines backed by international donors including USAID and DFID.
references
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