The Story Before the Ballot: What a Radio Drama Workshop Taught Us About Civic Awareness in South Sudan

South Sudan is walking toward something it has never done before.

On 22 December 2026, the country is scheduled to hold its first general elections since independence in 2011, closing a transitional period defined by conflict, a fragile peace agreement and one postponement after another. The National Elections Commission has launched a nationwide Civic and Voter Education Campaign, rolling out activities across the states and urging citizens to register, participate and keep the peace.

The consensus is encouraging. But intention is not infrastructure.

Between launching a campaign and a citizen who knows how to register, what their rights are, and how to spot a rumour before it becomes a reason for violence, there is a long and uneven road. That road runs straight into a harder question: how does information actually reach people in a country where the systems to carry it are still being built?

When the Signal Doesn't Reach Everyone

Start with the uncomfortable part. South Sudan is among the least digitally connected countries in the world. Internet penetration sits at roughly 13 per cent. Mobile connections have grown fast, but many are voice and SMS lines rather than data. Social media use is concentrated in a small, largely urban and youthful slice of the population.

So the toolkit that dominates election coverage elsewhere in the world- fact-checking websites, verified accounts, a WhatsApp forward checked against a browser extension- is simply not part of daily life for most South Sudanese. Least of all for rural communities, people with limited literacy, and persons with disabilities.

Here is the catch. The digital vacuum limits access to credible information. It does not limit the spread of rumour. Misinformation moves perfectly well through word of mouth, market gatherings, church congregations and informal networks, smartphone or no smartphone.

Which means a civic education strategy built mainly on digital literacy and online fact-checking will, by design, miss most of the electorate.

Why Radio Still Rules South Sudan airwaves.

Against that backdrop, radio remains the most consumed and most trusted medium in the country. Media landscape surveys keep finding the same thing: radio reaches a majority of people even in Juba, and it travels further into rural areas than television, print or the internet ever have. It also speaks the languages people use at home, which means what it carries gets discussed, argued over and socially reinforced in a way a solitary social media post rarely is.

That combination, reach plus trust plus communal listening, is exactly why radio drama can do work that a news bulletin or a public service announcement cannot.

A drama does not hand you a fact. It lets you sit with a character as she wrestles with a decision. Do I register to vote? Do I believe what I just heard about the other candidate? Do I accept the result if my side loses? The story, not instruction, delivers the answer. And that gap between being told and being shown is where attitudes actually shift.

Storytelling as Infrastructure, Not Decoration

This was the thinking behind the Radio Drama Storyline Design Workshop, convened under the Informing Democracy and Defending Freedoms in South Sudan project. It brought scriptwriters, producers, directors and civic actors into one room to develop 25 Juba-Arabic radio dramas for broadcast ahead of December.

What set it apart was a simple insistence: storytelling is infrastructure. It gets researched, structured and validated with the same rigour as any other civic education intervention.

Before drafting a single storyline, participants ran a preparatory research phase. They mapped the community's burning election concerns, gauged how well people actually understood the electoral process, and segmented the audience: first-time voters, rural and urban listeners, women, youth, persons with disabilities, community leaders. A standing validation panel, with an electoral commission representative, civil society organisations, gender, youth and disability advisors, and a peacebuilding expert, was set up to review themes and the politically sensitive terrain around them.

Then the storylines were mapped onto the electoral cycle itself: pre-registration, registration, campaign period, election day, results, and post-election reconciliation. Each phase carries its own civic education needs and its own risks.

The output is not a pile of disconnected episodes. It is a season. An episode grid ties every story to a specific civic objective. A message-to-episode matrix keeps corruption, peacebuilding, human rights and misinformation balanced across the run instead of bunched up in one corner. And scripts were pre-tested with a small sample audience before full production, to catch the confusing or unintended message before it reaches a national one.

Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities as Protagonists

One design principle kept resurfacing: stop writing women, youth and persons with disabilities as side characters or victims. Write them as protagonists making their own decisions.

This is not a diversity gesture. It answers real barriers, cultural resistance to women's candidacy, information that remains physically or informationally out of reach for persons with disabilities.

A campaign that only ever addresses "citizens" in general risks leaving the groups most exposed to exclusion and manipulation without a single story that looks like their life. Dedicating storylines to those barriers, and showing characters navigating them, does more than inform. It makes participation look achievable to people who had assumed the process was never built for them.

Prebunk, Don't Just Debunk

The most consequential choice from the workshop may be shifting from debunking to prebunking. Waiting for a rumour to spread and then issuing a correction is a race you usually lose; the correction rarely outruns the falsehood. So instead, the storylines show how a rumour starts and spreads in the first place, handing audiences a template for spotting manipulation before they meet it in the wild.

A second move matters just as much: teach verification without shaming the person who was fooled. Stigmatising belief tends to drive it underground rather than correct it.

The same logic carries over to hate speech. Rather than warning against escalation, the stories show consequence and repair: what happens when tension escalates, and how characters de-escalate and reconcile. Peacebuilding gets modelled, not just named.

And because no single channel reaches everyone, the framework calls for reinforcement across platforms: the drama itself, plus call-in segments, plus SMS and social content, so a correction has more than one way of finding a listener.

The Amalna Model: Why Local, Trusted Voices Matter

None of this design thinking survives contact with reality without an organisation that can produce it credibly and sustain it.

That is why local initiatives like Amalna South Sudan matter as much as the framework does. Amalna has spent close to a decade building this kind of edutainment infrastructure: the long-running youth peacebuilding drama "Sawa Shabab", broadcast in English, Arabic, Dinka and Nuer across more than two dozen national stations, and radio content produced with UNICEF, the International Rescue Committee and other partners reaching millions through media and outreach programming.

That track record is not incidental. In a context where information itself has often been a source of harm, civic education delivered by an unfamiliar or externally branded source struggles to earn trust. An organisation the public already knows is positioned to carry sensitive messaging. Pair that local production capacity with a structured, research-driven storyline framework, and you get national scale without losing local credibility.

Civic Education Is a Commitment, Not a Countdown

Launching a nationwide civic and voter education campaign is a real milestone. But an election-day deadline creates a temptation: treat civic education as a sprint, intense for a few months, then gone.

Misinformation, hate speech and disengagement do not vanish once the ballots are counted. If anything, the results and reconciliation period, flagged in the storyline framework as its own distinct and sensitive phase, is when tension runs highest and credible information is scarcest.

The more durable answer is to treat civic education as a permanent feature of South Sudan's media landscape and its digital one, well beyond this cycle. As internet and mobile access expand, digital literacy and online verification will become a necessary complement to what radio does. But for the foreseeable future, and certainly through December, radio remains one of the few tools capable of reaching the full breadth of the South Sudanese public, not only with information, but with the means to question and verify it.

Whether an informed electorate in December becomes a more inclusive, informed and peaceful citizenry in the years after depends on one thing: whether we build that capacity as infrastructure, or spend it as a campaign.