From On Air - Fall 2004

National Reach
Loma Luna is now airing throughout Peru

From northern cities like Iquitos to coastal Trujillo and southern Tacna, new listeners are tuning into Loma Luna in almost every region of Peru, a country of 27.5 million people.

The massive expansion is the result of a network of stations that signed on to air Loma Luna after an entertainment-education workshop in July 2004. In line with an agreement between PCI and Calandria, PCI’s NGO partner in Peru, forty stations were invited to participate in a three-day training session conducted by Calandria in the capital city of Lima. Radio station managers and directors, producers, on air personalities, and journalists from twenty-five stations participated in the training, which introduced them to the fundamentals of entertainment-education and facilitated their understanding of topics such as HIV/AIDS, family planning, domestic violence, and environmental awareness. Participants were also led through exercises on how to create stories using the Loma Luna values grid, which was developed at PCI’s initial methodology training for Calandria in October 2002.

The July training was immensely valuable, particularly for the many commercial stations that were not accustomed to airing social content dramas. Some stations began airing the episodes in July 2004, while most began in August.

The expansion sets the stage for a fruitful impact evaluation study which will measure changes in knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of listeners in the cities of Lima, Arequipa, and Tarapoto as a result of the program. The study will be conducted by researchers from Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia’s School of Public Health and will be completed in spring 2005.

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