Shujaaz built a comic and radio show youth loved, embedding messages in stories

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