With an average of seven children per woman, Uganda has one of the highest fertility rates and population growth rates in the world. Neighbors, a radio mini-series, was designed as an innovative way to communicate Uganda’s population crisis to men.
Neighbors revolves around the lives of two key characters: Bernard (who has planned his family and has few children) and Fred (who has not planned his large family). Using humor, the drama depicts the problems faced by a man with many children as compared to the relatively stress-free life of a man with a small family. Neighbors was produced in six languages and carried on 12 radio stations over a 6-month period in 2009.
The campaign changed the attitudes of nearly 1 million Ugandans about ideal family size and resulted in almost 500,000 visits to family planning clinics for contraceptive methods.
In 2009, Neighbors was awarded a Global Media Award for Best Serial Drama by the Population Institute.
Neighbors was developed as part of a national communication campaign implemented by the Uganda Ministry of Health in partnership with Health Communication Partnership-Uganda (HCP), a project managed by CCP and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
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