We have a responsibility to protect, empower youths of Africa —Monde Twala

Senior Vice President and General Manager of Paramount Africa, Monde Twala, leads some of the continent’s biggest entertainment brands, including MTV Base, BET Africa, Nickelodeon, and Comedy Central. In this interview by ADERONKE ADESANYA, Twala discusses the launch of the “Room of Safety” campaign, a powerful initiative designed to educate young people on online safety, digital well-being, and responsible engagement through the lens of storytelling and entertainment.

Why is this partnership important for Paramount Africa, MTV Base? Why do you think it is important especially in this campaign?

The partnership was really inspired by few things, if you look at MTV base, youth and entertainment platform on the paramount table particularly MTV Base, we get to a very broad reach as a platform, we are across the continent. We are not just into entertainment content but we’re about culture, we reflect youth culture, pop culture that resonates and shapes perspectives for young people and we’ve been doing this for many years and our research points us towards young people on the continent. They look at us as champions for culture, diversity that empowers and enables them.

When I started working on this project, it was really a core concern to look at the way young people are with health and we’ve been running mental health campaigns for quite some time on the mtv Base platform and fortunately we found alignment with MTN who just completed some market research and impact of online and digital connectivity and social platforms etc.

Technology is a big play in terms of consumers that we all serve both from paramount channels perspective and MTV’s perspective. I think that was the inspiration, it was looking at the state of school informed by the market research across East, West and South Africa. They start thinking what are the challenges facing young people and it happens that room of safety was been birth from that collaboration and it just made sense for us to come together and pull a lived youth experience.

How does Season 3 of Inside Life align with Paramount Africa’s goals, and what factors determined the selection of stars for this season?

I’m so excited about Inside Life and it is a strong franchise and it’s in its 30s in Nigeria and we’ve also been producing inside life in South Africa, it’s really developed from a need for us not only to deliver rooted content. Audience comes to us because of authenticity and they want story telling that reflects real ambitions and inspiration.

I tell people that Africans also don’t really watch television for escapism, Africa has a deep need to also learn as the youngest continent in the world which means we’re a learning continent which represents great opportunities for us to do contents that reflects culture and heritage of Africans resilient and content that builds a culture of collaboration and I think that’s what ‘Inside Life’ is about, we go inside the lives of amazing people and tell the stories of artists, sport stars, it could be anyone that walks that path and shines the spot light.

The criteria is the hustle and we should be proud of it and it shows the resourcefulness.

How has the concept of safety for young people evolved in the digital age compared to previous generations without internet access?

If you look at the impact of technology, it is a great enabler for young people to connect and get information and education. Entertainment is now very much mobile and accessible. It comes with a responsibility to make sure that it  can help young people navigate and create a safe digital experience for all young people. When we kicked off room of safety we came together with MTN to really focus on how to make this partnership enable young people and children to be safe in this kind of new digital era and that’s what the campaign is about to teach them how to use these safety tools on online platforms.

What impact can positive messaging have on young people, and how does Inside Life’s Hustle Diaries series help spread inspiring stories and messages?

I’ve been doing this for many years, working with young people, youth perspective to cultivate storytelling and entertainment content that can not only reflect who they are but to be authentic and I greatly believe that Africans do not watch content for pure escapism, we watch television content with a key filter to learn something for a take-out, for experience and more enrichment and I’m a big advocate for edutainment format.

We started inside life showing stars because people love celebrities and a little bit of gossip, we all want to know what happens behind closed doors of some of our big celebrities. With Hustle Diaries, we took it one step further, we leveraged pop culture. You’ve seen some of the personalities on the show, some big and popular personalities, they come from somewhere, they were not born celebrities, they hustle.

What the show does especially in such tough economic times is that we are all looking for inspiration, stories that showcase resourcefulness and how we can be determined and ambitious. Young people in this continent are looking for stories of hope and entertainment. Reality format in this context really works well because your journey inspires someone to work and win.

If you want to talk about the vulnerability of young people in Africa where online bullying and harassment is rampant, in your interactions with younger people, how do you approach the conversations about their digital wellbeing and responsibilities?

From MTV base perspective, Paramount, we’ve been committed to mental health as a social concern and all of these are informed by what we hear and see while engaging with young people. If you look at suicide rate, particularly post-Covid, mental health as become a growing concern for young Africans and we are in the space of helping young people and we’re a platform for young people, we use perspective that are more important to us, what entertains them and shaping narratives that are more progressive and can help in unlocking potential is very important to us.

We have done something similar before ’MTV shuga’ that was specifically on health care, HIV/aids education in a storytelling form that can influence young people to practice safe s3xual behaviors which is related to mental health because we are aware of the kind of FOMO that is birth from online. I’m very proud of the partnership with MTN and I think Mtn has been proactive, it is a tech company that is more mindful of the market and territory they operate and they’re listening to help children in children research is deep and the young people and children we interviewed told us about some of the experiences they had and it is our job to use creativity and leverage the power of entertainment and storytelling to make it relatable and accessible.

What will you say is the vulnerability young people face in Africa?

One of key areas is misinformation, there are many things facing young people like online threats, bullying and harassment, they don’t know to to report cyberbullying because all of that comes together and imposes young people to take actions against the negative misinformation. The inappropriate content, how do we make sure that we protect them?

Television platforms are regulatory platforms, there are kind of regulations that you can’t show unhealthy content, there’s also age restrictions on many media platforms but there is no age restriction online, it requires a much deeper dive in terms of making sure that young people are doing some peer to peer education and are reporting misaligned content and it’s about empowering them and educating them from misinformation from all the negative stuffs that is happening online.

Online platforms are not regulated and that requires industries to implement regulation techniques and methods and in this case of storytelling by the youths around online safety, ‘Room of safety’ is young people talking to young people about the challenges and it will translate through the content that we’ve launched out.

How can young people actively participate and support the ‘Room of Safety’ campaign to ensure their own safety and well-being online?

We’ve rolled out a campaign and it is informed by the youth and for the youth and it is an important pillar because by engaging young Africans from different parts of the continent, already using research-based tools and content that can help them navigate the negativity that they face online.

One distinctive element is that this campaign is youth-led; the stories you’ll see are stories that come from young people. Room of safety is culturally relevant because it’s a young person in Nigerian, Ghana, and Uganda. That’s the key signature and tone for the campaign because it is informative and entertaining at the same time. What we expect and hope is that we can spark a beginning of new and good conversation.

We explore themes like how to report abusive behavior online. The technology has reporting tools but most of the time young people don’t know how to leverage or use the tools to report abuse, sexual content, harmful content that is not suitable for them.

It holds all of us accountable as industries we are all accountable to make sure we continue to create safe space for young people to flourish, grow and elevate themselves across diverse communities across African continent.

What role does your partnership with MTN play in your own business goal of empowering youths in Africa?

The vision is really about changed behaviour and we want to enhance storytelling that is able to shift behavior and educate young people and help them build the tools to report harmful content online, address issues in their voicing and tone and real-life experiences, partly, there’s a reality form in this partnership with MTN room of safety.

Five episodes have already been aired. Have you been able to get feedback and is it what you’re expecting?

Our hope is that we will be able to shape behavior that can really create a digital safe experience for all young people in years to come and engagement is great online, there’s been good engagement on our social platforms in terms of the on-air rollout, the episodes.  I think it’s about sparking conversations, parents being able to talk to young people and young people talking to their peers and exchange information that can create safe space for all of us including young people and I think that’s what we want to inspire.

What significance do the inspiring stories of superstars in the Inside Life series hold for Paramount Africa and its audience?

Inside life is in its third season and we’ve done two seasons in the last couple of years that really gave us a glimpse into some of the best talent we have in the market. This season comes with a slightly different twist because its really about the amazing journey, we all want to know the story of where some of our amazing stars comes from and this season talks about ambition, it talks about rootedness, determination and living your dreams and showcases some of the talents from Nigeria.

Nigeria is the entertainment maker of this continent and that also inspires us from the paramount perspective to continue to deliver content that will inspire authentic journey in the entertainment way and a little bit of gossip because we want to know where our stars come from and I think the viewers are going to be surprised and find out information about their celebrities that they don’t really know. It’s going to be a very beautiful, entertaining and vibrant season.

MTV base and paramount Africa are partnering With Mtn on the ‘Room of safety’ campaign, can you highlight what the partnership means to paramount and MTV base?

I’m quite proud of this project because it’s not only a natural extension of a vision we’ve had as paramount because we’re a youth brand and we’re really proud about reflecting content that is relevant to the youth, by the youth  for Africa by Africans so our partnership with MTN was just a great fitting energy. Mtn had done quite extensive research around online safety for children and they came up with the research papers called ‘Help children be children’ they engaged with us because we’ve been working with the youth cultured space but going beyond entertainment content and formats, we’ve done initiatives on mental health, elevating gender challenges on gender issues particularly mental health was a big piece we started working on and MTN came to us to see how they can collaborate with us and it was a perfect fit because online space has had an impact on young people and technology held one level as an enabler but on another level the reality of technology is that online content can be harmful and have negative impact on young people from the mental health and behavioral perspective, from abusive perspective and many challenges young people face and that gave birth to ‘The Room of Safety’ and this is a great content format that is anchored by research but executed by entertainment, pop , storytelling culture that resonates with the youth across the market.

The research was also pan African research, MTN did this research across multiple regions: East Africa, South Africa, West Africa, across key markets and the findings were really in that youthful experiences and voice. Young people were telling us in that research of some of the not-so-great experiences online like inappropriate content or cyber bullying or improper approaches they’re getting on social media. All of that creates instability in terms of mental health and safety, we came together and felt that the responsible thing was to come up with some guidelines, content and storytelling in their voice, give them the voice and platform to talk about those experiences and that’s what Room of Safety is all about.

While doing that we make sure the education elements of pointing them to relevant tools to help them navigate online platforms that are inappropriate and that there’s sufficient reporting. It’s important that we make the tools accessible and make the campaign and storytelling relatable so that deliver and create awareness. So this initiative and partnership with MTN is very progressive and it influences, shape and structures safe spaces for young people online .

What impacts are you expecting from the campaign?

The impact for me is about driving engagement, highlighting the threats that exist online, particularly misinformation, cyberbullying and change behaviour. It does take a while but looking at the digital engagement on the series running out on air, it has been great, we’re seeing a lot of tech partners coming on board to see how they can help influence. Companies like Meta, TikTok and other online platforms are supportive and they all have the tools for reporting threatening and harmful content on their platform but no one knows how. So this is a long-term campaign.

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