edutainment.

Entertainment-Education is an approach to education in which social messages are incorporated into entertainment programmes with the intention of increasing audience member’s knowledge about an educational issue, engender favourable attitudes, and change behaviour. It is also known as EE, enter-educate, edutainment and infotainment.

The strategy is to combine the efforts of (1) a creative team that designs the storyline, incorporating socially informative messages, and (2) an evaluation team that uses communication and behavioural theories to achieve and measure behaviour change.

In most western nations television is the primary medium for entertainment education. In the United States and the United Kingdom EE has been used to address substance abuse, immunization, teenage pregnancy, HIV/AIDS, cancer, and other health issues in TV sitcoms, dramas and soap operas.

Some messages are generated by producers and scriptwriters because they have a personal interest in the issue, by advisors who suggest ways to make scripts and characters more realistic, or by external agencies who seek to communicate their message to audiences.

Some EE is specific to a single issue for a single episode, while other programmes involve continuing involvement over many years. An episode of the 1970s American TV sitcom Happy Days is reported to have increased US demand for library cards some six-fold. The UK radio soap The Archers has been systematically educating its audience on agricultural matters for decades. In Tanzania Twende na Wakati (Let's Go With the Times ) was a radio soap opera written entirely as entertainment-education about the adoption of family planning.