"The Team" Plays on Common Ground

Mr. Marks, tell me a bit about your organization, Search for Common Ground.

I founded Common Ground in 1982. I believe we are the largest NGO doing conflict resolution on the ground around the world. We have offices in 18 countries. Our mission is to transform the way the world deals with conflict, away from adversarial win-lose approaches to non-adversarial win-win approaches. And we use a very diverse toolbox. All the methodologies we use are all based on a simple idea: Understand the differences and act on the commonalities.

Within that context, you can do almost anything. You can do judicial kinds of conflict resolution such as mediation and facilitation, or you can do less traditional ones like TV production, radio production, music videos, soap operas, community organizing, working with youth, and so on. We've been doing this for 27 years and so every few years, we add something new to the toolbox.

The production of soap operas for social change represents a good portion of your overall programming, does it not?

We estimate around 50 percent.

A specific example of this type of programming is a soap called "The Team."

This is produced and shown in Kenya so perhaps you can start by giving us a little backgrounder on the Kenyan context–why such a production would be necessary or helpful?

Kenya, which had not had tribal or ethnic problems for a long time–at least since the last election, actually erupted into something near flames after the elections that took place late December 2007. And the tribal differences came back to the forefront in a big way. We were asked by a Kenyan NGO to work with them by using media to help diffuse tribal differences. We find that soap opera or drama is a very effective way of doing this.

So you partnered with a local organization?

Yes, it is called Media Focus in Africa.

And that is a standard approach for your organization?

We would never presume to write anything that we do in terms of TV or radio production, from 5,000 miles away. We always have a local partner or local writers, directors, and everything else. At most, we would have one expatriate from here working on a program.

So apart from actually producing something that may have a positive impact on their society, you also foster skills development and grow local capacity?

That's right. One of the aims, although it's not the primary aim, is to raise the bar in terms of production in the country where we are working. In some countries, we have had a really transformative effect on the level of journalism–Burundi would be the best example of that.

So post election in Kenya, there was violent uprising that was at least in part based on ethnic or tribal divisions. Common Ground, in collaboration with Media Focus in Africa developed a script or a treatment?

We had already developed the format; we had this platform to do The Team in 10 countries. We had a grant from DFID in the UK to fund it. And so we put Kenya on the list even before the election because it was such an important country.

Tell me about this 26-part episodic called "The Team."

In virtually every country that we've worked in, there are usually religious or ethnic differences, or regional differences. We also realized that football, or soccer as it is called here, was the most popular sport in the world, outside of North America. With the 2010 World Cup being held in Africa, it would only increase in popularity in Africa. So we thought football provided a perfect platform to talk about issues of ethnic conflict, encouraging mutual understanding and reconciliation. In every country there are people of different religions and ethnic groups, who come from different regions, and they play together on the same football team. The core metaphor is very simple; if they don't cooperate, they don't score goals. So we felt that metaphor could be expanded. In other words, the team becomes the metaphor for a well-functioning Kenya. Actually in Kenya we did something we've never done in other places; it has gender diversity. I probably wouldn't have pushed into the gender one, I was just thinking tribal. The local writers came up with that little spin.

"The Team" is a real soap opera, not just a creative instructional video-type program?

Yes, this is a real drama, it's real entertainment and the degree to which it is entertaining will determine how popular it will be. I mean we have radio soaps in a place like Burundi or Sierra Leone that capture up to 90 percent listenership. And that is the kind of goal we are shooting for. There will also be a radio version of the whole "The Team" in Kenya.

So you have these entertaining storylines with underlying core messages that you want to convey. And much of these storylines would be developed and written by locals, in this case, Kenyan writers?

The only requirement is that it needs to fit within I would call a Common Ground framework. In other words, they are not allowed to be pro-genocide, racist or whatever–it has to fit within our standards. But after that, whatever they come up with is fine.

Are you able to run ratings to assess viewership, or do you rely on reviews or critiques?

All of that. In Kenya, they do have ratings but they are slow, so we don't have the numbers yet. We have got very good promotion by the station, Citizen TV. There are articles in most of the newspapers and we are using SMS at the station to garner feedback. We are told that from the station's point of view, they are getting swamped.

The series has relatively high production standards–both technical and creative?

"The Team" is very different from other Kenyan soaps in terms of the overall quality of the production. We are doing something which is at the high end of the production market and although it might not look like a Hollywood soap, or Little Mosque on the Prairie, it does look better than anything else on TV there, produced there. This kind of program has never been on before; it looks good to people and it's realistic.

How else do you get this program out to Kenyans?

We are going to have mobile cinemas and we will also be adapting "The Team" for radio broadcasts.

Will there be a formal education component? Or are you targeting an older audience only?

It is right across the board but young adults are our particular target audience. There will be DVDs given out to civil society organizations. We will strive for maximum impact through outreach, and incidentally, a very interesting phenomenon is taking place and this has just happened to us as well in Lebanon where we are doing a different soap opera. The cast of "The Team" has come to us, we didn't put them up to it, and they said, look we really want to continue to do this work, would you train us to be able to go out around the country and do it? In other words, bring people together and talk about one Kenya. I believe we are going to be launching a youth effort or movement for one Kenya, or something along those lines.

And this is a really a good platform to start with because these actors, as we have seen in other projects like this, become huge stars and they have a role in their society. They become spokespeople for the characters that they play on the screen.

That's interesting. That is one of the outcomes that probably wouldn't have been anticipated when you were first designing this project?

Well one of my great experiences over this last 27 years is that unanticipated results are at least as interesting as those we had anticipated.

What is it about the format of soap operas that seems to work so well, regardless of cultures?

I think every country in the world has a storytelling tradition, an oral tradition. I have never seen one that doesn't. And soaps play to that. People like the stories–that's also why they go to movies.

You have had other experiences, I guess, where these types of productions may not have worked out so well. I read on your Website about the Middle East not working out so well. Or in Liberia, your radio station was looted?

It was looted, but we got back on the air and we are now very popular in Liberia.

I'm wondering, based on your experience, if there are certain environmental or cultural conditions that need to be in place for these things to be successful?

It's a lot easier if there is not much competition in the media. If you're talking about a place that has 150 cable channels, it's hard to get traction. From our perspective, having a small media market is an important condition. You can have overwhelming results with a small media market. It's also because the degree of cynicism isn't too high, which you do find in the Middle East.

How do you go about selecting local partners?

Each place is different. In some places, we pretty much do our own production and hire locals. In other places, we work with an existing NGO or an existing production company. We try to find people who get what we are talking about at Common Ground. We want to work with people who share our values, and if needed, we train them.

Do you send people from the States, say as senior technical personnel or as producers?

The most that we have ever had on the ground is one line producer. In some places she would be there for no more than three or four weeks, during production. It was more of a training role. Where in other places, we have had a person who stays for the whole production But you can't take just any producer from North America and ship them out if they have never worked in that kind of atmosphere. Too many things don't work, it is too threatening, and then add in the timing. There is a whole rhythm that is just different. We have had producers who freak out; they want to be able to turn on the lights and know there will be electricity, for example.

Any thoughts or insights on what makes intercultural collaborations like this successful?

Parachuting doesn't usually work.

How do you mean?

In other words, dropping in for a week and leaving and thinking you can do something. Which is why we work with people on the ground–the occasional expat–but mainly people who live in the country. You know, an expat can have this kind of knowledge, but not people who just go in for a week or two. You need to establish a long-term relationship.

What's on the horizon for Common Ground?

Well we've got 10 more series that are similar to "The Team" to produce, which is a lot. And we keep adding new ones. We have just added Palestine and we likely have just added Zimbabwe.

John Marks, thank you for this and good luck.

You're very welcome.

Additional Learning

The Team Website
Search for Common Ground
Cultural Insights: Kenya
Intercultures Magazine: The Woman of Kibera