Switch - Chip Heath [97]
Health experts call these sugar-daddy relationships “cross-generational.” In the age group 15 to 24, women in sub-Saharan Africa are three times more likely to be HIV-positive than men in the same age range. It’s the relationships that these younger women have with older men that explain the disparity. The cross-generational relationship opens up a bridge for HIV to travel between populations that ordinarily wouldn’t intersect.
The other thing that’s different about sugar-daddy relationships in Tanzania is that, despite the health risks, there’s no strong social taboo against the behavior. In the United States, 50-year-old lechers who chase college girls are punished for it socially. Can’t you just hear the man’s sister telling him, “You’re pathetic”? Can’t you just see the eyes rolling at his office? But there’s no real equivalent of this social stigma in Tanzania. It’s accepted that high-status men will display their status in this way.
Yet the great majority of Tanzanians—89 percent in one poll—believe that cross-generational relationships are wrong. Unfortunately, their opposition tends to be quiet and private; it’s an uncomfortable issue to discuss.
In August 2007, Pamela White and Mike Gehron of USAID, a relief organization that’s part of the U.S. State Department, called together a diverse team of experts (including the two of us) in a hotel in Dar es Salaam. The mission: to develop a campaign to fight cross-generational sex. Leading the team was a group from Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. Others included AIDS experts and about a dozen local artists and creatives (producers, actors, writers, and at least one Tanzanian soap-opera star, who was interrupted at one point for an autograph).
The discussions were difficult. The issue was complicated, and it wasn’t even clear where to start. For example, no one believed that scolding the sugar daddies would be effective in stopping their behavior. And the public-health experts thought that we were unlikely to convince young women to refuse the advances of these men, because the social and financial pressures on them were too intense to be countered by a campaign. So we started thinking: If we can’t change the main characters in this story, can we change their environment?
Recall from Chapter 8 that Rackspace changed individuals by changing their environment, their culture. But that was one company. Was it possible to change the social atmosphere in an entire country? The team knew that Tanzanians objected to cross-generational relationships but, for whatever reason, remained quiet about them. Could the team give a voice to that resentment?
We needed to find a way to make Tanzanians feel comfortable discussing something uncomfortable, a way to disarm the conversation. And someone blurted out: “We need people to be able to laugh at this! We need humor!”
Inspired, the team hatched the idea for a villain. He’d be a villain people would love to hate, like J.R. Ewing, the eternally scheming oilman of the old TV show Dallas. As the group kicked around the idea, a portrait of the villain began to emerge: He’d be an older man who encapsulated the sugar daddy—someone who hit on young girls constantly, relentlessly, shamelessly. He’d approach them anywhere he could find them, and he’d offer favors—free meals, free drinks, clothes, or time on his cell phone.
Someone suggested that the villain be called “Fataki,” and everyone’s eyes lit up. Fataki is a Swahili word that translates loosely as “explosion” or “fireworks”—something dangerous and a bit unstable. In other words, Fataki is someone you want to stay away from.
The plan was to start telling Fataki’s story in radio commercials, because radio comes closest to being a universal medium in Tanzania. The team started dreaming up dozens of situations to put Fataki in, and across these situations there would be a