Field Placement: Soul City, Institute for Health and Development Communication
Location: Johannesburg, South Africa
Preceptor: Lebo Ramafoko
Student Name: Sarah L. Kuljian
Year: 2003


During the summer of 2003, I gained field work experience in an internship at Soul City, Institute for Health and Development Communication in Johannesburg, South Africa. This organization is a multi-media health promotion and social change project. Through drama and entertainment Soul City reaches over 16 million South Africans.

My charge in my internship at Soul City was to assist Lebo Ramafoko, my supervisor, with the series development process, which takes over 18 months to complete. The part of the series development process I was most involved in was the message design process.

During my time at Soul City I assisted in conducting multiple stakeholder consultations, attended and participated in message design workshops, completed several message design briefs, wrote an abstract for an upcoming conference, and attended an incredible workshop on sexuality that was held at the Women’s Health Project. I also was involved in the analysis of focus group research conducted on each of the topic areas for the upcoming Soul City series (series seven). The topic areas for the upcoming series, although this could shift during later stages of the development process, are Health and Equity, HIV/AIDS treatment literacy, Manhood/Masculinity, Service/Volunteerism, and Cancer of the Cervix.

My time spent doing stakeholder consultations was extremely valuable. It gave me a good sense of the type of work being conducted in South Africa around the topic areas mentioned above. It also gave me an understanding of how different organizations worked or failed to work together as well as where there was duplication of work and where there were possible gaps to fill. This process set the stage for my understanding of the South African context for these topics, which helped me a great deal in the later stages of the message design process.

During my time at Soul City, we conducted five message design workshops. During the workshops, stakeholders were brought together to help Soul City in creating messages for the upcoming drama series, radio programs and print materials. The discussions and raw messages developed during these workshops were then put into message briefs, along with information from literature reviews and focus group research conducted by Soul City. I was responsible for creating three of the five message briefs following the message design workshops. The process often involved taking ideas presented by stakeholders at these workshops and transforming these ideas into simple messages. Gaining a greater understanding through stakeholder consultations, earlier in the summer (South Africa’s winter), of the current state of knowledge around the topic areas, assisted in my ability to recognize when messages may need to be simplified to aid in the audience’s understanding. The messages created through this process will ultimately be integrated into scripts for the Soul City television drama series and radio programs, and will also be used in print materials.

I found my experience at Soul City to be extremely valuable. It gave me an opportunity to work at an organization doing exciting and original work using the media to address important health and development issues. It also gave me my first experience working internationally. I learned a great deal about the work that can go into designing messages and how research plays a significant part in this process. While, if I had the opportunity to do it over again, knowing what I know now, I may have arranged for the opportunity to work in more than one of the departments at Soul City to further diversify my experience, it was a great internship experience.

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