蜜芽传媒

Since 1989 more than 50,000 Afghan civilians have been killed or injured by landmines and explosive remnants of war - averaging up to 160 people per month.

This took a sharp spike in 2021, after Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, and people began returning to previously conflict-affected areas which were still heavily contaminated with improvised mines and remnants of war. That year, 1,144 people are thought to have been killed or injured 鈥� nearly 4 out of every 5 of them children.

In 2022, the UN Mine Action Service (UNMAS) funded 蜜芽传媒 Media Action to use mass media to help raise awareness and build public knowledge, helping people to identify and avoid contaminated areas and encouraging people to report any explosive hazards.

We broadcast content on our weekly Darman (Healing) radio magazine programme; aired radio PSAs in local languages across 44 local radio stations and the 蜜芽传媒 Afghan Service; broadcast TV PSAs on 10 local TV stations, two prominent national TV stations (Tolo and 1TV), and on the Open Jirga Facebook page. To reach people on the move we used announcements on intercity buses; we also shared pre-recorded content via simple mobile phones with communities without media access.

Watch our PSAs - including a magical camel!

What we learned

Our formative research showed that people were concerned about explosive ordnance and talked about it - but they mostly talked about accidents and injuries, rather than what to do or how to protect themselves. There was little trusted content in media on the risks and how to manage them, particularly for children.

People were also reluctant to stop going on land with explosive ordnance, because they needed to earn their livelihoods - tending animals, collecting food, farming and construction. We learned that children were told off or beaten by their parents and elders for taking risks like looking at remnants or showing off by playing with them - but parents did not explain why these behaviours put them at risk.

In our work, we wanted to change how explosive ordnance is discussed and give people the confidence to challenge risky behaviour.

To evaluate our impact, we collected data through a nationally representative survey鈥痺ith 2,800 participants, and drew on social media analytics to help measure the reach of the programmes across Afghanistan.

We also conducted a longitudinal panel study鈥痺ith 400 people who said they used media regularly in 10 provinces, considered to be most vulnerable for explosives. A survey was conducted at the beginning (March 2022) and at the end of the project (July 2022), to measure any shifts in knowledge, attitudes, and actions.

Participants were not asked to listen to or watch our content. They were called every two weeks over four months to monitor whether they had listened to or watched any of the content, which formed part of our analysis.

We found that the more content participants were exposed to, the more likely they were to have higher knowledge, a greater ability to identify risks, and greater intentions to practice safe behaviour - even when we controlled for demographics like gender and urban or rural locations.

Groundbreaking approach

When we started this work, there was no research evaluating the effectiveness of explosive ordnance risk education programmes in Afghanistan, and research in this area from around the world was also scarce.

We are proud that these results constitute one of the first pieces of systematically collected evidence on media and communication鈥檚 potential in explosive risk education in field conditions and has now been published in (leads to third party site).

Paul Heslop, Senior Mine Action Adviser with UNMAS, now based in Ukraine, said that experts in mine injury prevention work had long been frustrated by their inability to measure the impact of risk education. 鈥淲hat was really groundbreaking for us was, one, the preparation that went into producing the material, two, the targeting and segmentation of that material, the ability to make decisions based on data and analytics, tracking the progress of the project and then seeing the impact of the project,鈥� he said.

鈥淚 think the results from this project will allow these techniques and this approach to outcome-driven, data-driven, decision-making in risk education and other aspects of mine action, (and) will have a huge impact across the world over the next 5 to 10 years.鈥�

Our work in Afghanistan was funded by . We are now drawing on our experience and insights to deliver mine awareness work in Ukraine and .

Read more about our research into the power of media for mine awareness in Afghanistan.