Come and share your passion for education and empowerment!
For the past few months, we have been working on a set of four new Ubongo Kids episodes with the UK-based Goodall Foundation (formerly known as the Robin and Sylvia Goodall Charitable Foundation).
In 2006, the chance meeting of two mothers with very different lives inspired the Goodall Foundation. Sylvia Goodall was travelling in a remote part of Northern Tanzania when she came across women whose community had extremely limited resources. Her desire to help improve educational resources for the community later blossomed into the Goodall Foundation which has since been able to expand their geographical reach and impact. The Goodall Foundation now strives to advance education for young people and to empower them by helping them develop the skills and capabilities necessary to find reliable employment.
And that’s where Ubongo comes in! Sharing our passion for education and empowerment, the Goodall Foundation has commissioned four episodes of Ubongo Kids focusing on enhancing key character strengths in young people: Growth Mindset, Curiosity, Purpose and Grit. You might be thinking, How do you teach character? And, truth be told, we had to ask ourselves the same question.
One of the biggest challenges we faced was defining the characteristics we wanted to teach. The knowledgeable Goodall team were able to help us with comprehensive examples and explanations in English, but figuring out how to best translate these into the Kiswahili language and culture was another matter entirely. Often what is a really common word in one language has two or three or four (!) variations in another. Take ‘Purpose’ for example. Simple enough in English, sure, but in Kiswahili, we had multiple variations on the best translation, with definitions varying from ‘goals’ to ‘doing something on purpose’. Luckily, our user-testing team was up for the challenge and worked with local kids to find the best Kiswahili words and definitions.
Our team of writers then worked hard to come up with funny and effective stories to teach these character strengths to our audience. As with all our stories, this required story-telling sessions with kids to highlight weaknesses in the plot and to refine our language and explanations to make it as kid-centric as possible. It was vital to remain culturally sensitive to these character strengths. For example, while we want to encourage kids to ask questions and be actively curious, it’s important to remember that in some cultures questioning your parents or elders can make a child appear disobedient, rude or badly behaved.
All four episodes are now in production. Adorable and hilarious new characters are being designed, catchy songs are being recorded, and storyboards are coming to life! We also recently held a fantastic voice acting workshop in-office to help train our talented young voice actors to draw on their emotions and experiences to help bring our scripts to life.
We’re now looking forward to being able to test our animated content to see how these topics resonate with kids in Tanzania. Watch the trailer here!
