Impact BBDO

Client: EBM
Product: Education
Title: Schoolgirl Newscasters
Media: Broadcast
Country: Pakistan
Date Of Campaign: Dec 10, 2022

Background: Women in Pakistan are overwhelmingly deprived of their basic right to education. The Global Gender Gap Report placed the country at 145th rank out of 156. UN Women has stated that 53.6% of women had limited access to education, training, and employment in Pakistan. There’s a widely held believe that education is useless for women. Due to social economic and cultural reasons parents keep girls out of school, preferring to have them do housework, or worse – get them married off early.However, NGOs and companies like EMB have been working tirelessly to promote women’s education. Their efforts resulted in more girls going to school and raised the literacy rate up 4 points.We wanted to celebrate this achievement and demonstrate how empowering girls with education can brighten their future and uplift the nation. We also hoped to inspire more parents to send their girls to school.

Idea: We turned our news into breaking news, with a special new broadcast. Two school-going girls, who could not even read three years back, took over as newscasters for the evening, reading the news to millions of people on Pakistan’s three leading news channels.The girls, wearing their school uniforms, confidently shared their literacy journeys and how it had enabled them to read the news to millions of people in impeccable Urdu and English. They also highlighted the role of education in making them better caretakers of future generations.This special broadcast was aired during Human Rights Month, to emphasize Pakistani girls’ right to education.

Results: The School girls newscasters is a very special news segment that was broadcasted on the top 3 news channels in Pakistan. The campaign had an impression count of more than 150 million.EBM itself has now introduced a policy of only working with schools that have an equal representation of male and female students. Their efforts have led to numbers in 160+ schools in Pakistan that have now seen girls' enrollment lift to 57%.The activation trended over social media, with people across the country praising the school girls and celebrating the literacy news. This was an idea that had hijacked its PR medium itself.Seeing the girls so confidently take over the newsroom made for a powerful image that resonated with parents all over Pakistan, stirring hope from more girls like them to make their way toward a brighter future.