Tonderia Tsara
HOW CAN we prevent young people from starting to smoke? It’s a question to which, as the direct link between smoking, cancer and ill-heath becomes clearer, countries across the world are desperately trying to find the answers.
That’s certainly the case in Africa. While smoking rates in Africa remain low compared with other continents and regions, they are rising rapidly, particularly among the young.
According to recent research, there has been a 71 percent increase in the number of African teenagers who have tried smoking since 2008. It explains why, although the prevalence of smoking among adult Africans remains the lowest in the world, it is now higher among boys and girls than in any other developing regions.
This shocking rise is storing up huge problems for Africa. Smoking is already the number one cause of cancer on the continent, killing more people every day.
Unless we tackle tobacco consumption among young Africans now, estimates suggest that the number of smokers on the continent will rise seven-fold by the end of the century. The future cost – in human lives, health-care costs and lost economic opportunities – will be a huge brake on our continent’s ambitions for the future.
But how do we go about reversing this worrying trend, stopping young Africans from becoming smokers? In Botswana, we have been pioneering a new approach – the SKY project – to inspire teenage girls to make the positive choice to turn their backs on smoking before they even start.
Drawing on insights from social marketing and behaviour change, we decided that SKY should start with the person not the issue. We also realised that, like young people all over the world, those in Botswana don’t like being told what to do but want to find the right path for themselves. We also discovered that while most of the girls said they didn’t want to start smoking, many felt under pressure to try. We realised that they were more likely to listen to their friends than adults, no matter how well-meaning.
So we set out to create a campaign and movement that would allow teenage girls to provide encouragement to each other to resist the temptations to smoke.
For SKY to succeed we knew that it would be critical to work within the social world of teenage girls and to put them in charge of creating the content.
Where previous campaigns have failed, SKY is succeeding because it has marshalled the cool factor – hip-hop stars releasing singles, hot ticket events, a glossy teen magazine, hit radio shows – to create a movement led by teenage girls that is stripping away the aspiration to smoke.
SKY’s success is also rooted in its innovative use of social media, a powerful tool that enables young people to express themselves directly in a way that traditional media does not allow. The campaign is also a powerful example of how advertising and marketing can support public health initiatives.
We are looking to use SKY’s approach and all we have learnt in other African countries to mobilise young people to eliminate the cool factor tied to smoking.
It is not too late to prevent Africa following the path of other continents that are struggling to cope with an epidemic of ill-health. It is a battle, for the young people and for Africa as a whole – we must win.
Tonderia Tsara is a partner at Dialogue Saatchi & Saatchi, which helped to design and launch the SKY project www.skygirlsbw.com