Angola

The Team

The Team, or A Equipa, centres on an imagined Angolan football club and serves as an entry point for dialogue on sensitive themes of governance, participation, and transparency. The telenovella explores governance issues through the interactions between the players, captains, coaches, officials and through the players' personal lives. The storylines model different approaches to collaborative problem solving, metaphorically addressing the tensions in Angola's decentralisation process, including the role of leaders and authority figures in a democratic environment, the importance of transparency and consultation between leaders and constituents, and the importance of constructive advocacy.

The success of The Team builds on the inspirational role that soccer plays around the globe. The game provides the framework and the setting to engage a mass audience in promoting positive social change. In each country, the players manage to resolve the inevitable conflicts that arise, and they discover that the commonalities that join them are far deeper than the differences which threaten to tear them apart. Characters demonstrate cooperative behaviour, which is essential both to winning at soccer and to peacefully resolving the pressing problems that their country faces. Indeed, the mega-metaphor is that each country needs to come together as a Team, not as a collection of individuals or ethnic or political groups, and that cooperation is essential for development.

The Team — Angola is one version of the award-winning project created and produced by SFCG and aired in 16 countries around the world. Through the television and radio program, SFCG aims to change adversarial attitudes in countries that have experienced conflicts by presenting diverse football teams, who understand that success on the field comes only with cohesion, tolerance, unity, and respect for others off the field.

Storyline Development

In Angola, the characters are part of a football team based in Lubango. The issues and core messages touched on in The Team were developed through consultations with members of civil society and members of five different local governments, culminating in a curriculum summit in Luanda. Through this participatory process, SFCG and its partners were able to identify the major issues that needed to be addressed and articulate clear objectives and messages for the show.

These messages were put into a storyline focused on a football team, presenting the social issues facing young people and showing how these problems are resolved in a different way than would be normal in reality in Angola. With the help of student associations from each school in the school parliament program, A Equipa will be presented to students at 15 schools in Luanda and Cabinda. Screenings will be accompanied by a facilitation manual to further discuss and develop the issues. The intention is to also undertake outreach sessions in Lubango, Huambo, Cabinda and Luanda, with partners of SFCG involved in civic education work.

The core metaphor is simple: if characters do not learn to play together, they will not score goals. Through the course of the series, characters learn that cooperative behaviour is essential both to winning at football and in life. Storylines feature footballers, families and friends, who overcome significant problems both on and off the football pitch to achieve shared goals. Programmes feature positive role models and promote understanding and tolerance. They demonstrate that adversarial approaches and suspicion are rarely the best approach to solving problems.

By exploring the lives and stories of the players, their families, and their communities, the story is a vehicle for transmitting factual information about decentralization and democratic consolidation in a highly creative and entertaining format as the players and their families interact with authorities and discuss their opinions of democracy, decentralization, and other issues. Characters from the television show are empathetic and easily identifiable, representing a wide variety of regional, linguistic, and socio-economic backgrounds.

Public Reception

To maximize the effect of the show, SFCG Angola developed a set of peacebuilding activities around the program, aimed at creating relationships between people from across dividing lines, and at catalysing action, tied into the program's messages. Activities include soccer tournaments, mobile cinema screenings, leadership and peacebuilding trainings, in-school civic education curricula, and peace campaigns using SMS and new media technology. These involve a host of organizations and groups in the activities to ensure that they are rooted in society.

One of Angola's leading newspapers, Jornal de Angola, recently ran a story on the new season, bringing more publicity to the already popular show. The article praised the new season saying, "The storylines, the material resources used, and the high level of performance by coaches and players are, from the start, reason to consider that the public viewer will be entertained by the high technical and artistic quality" of the show.

The Team in Angola just finished filming 15 new episodes in Huila province. In the new season, issues of women's empowerment take center stage, including sexual violence and domestic abuse. This season delves into the women behind many of the male characters and demonstrates the barriers and catalysts to women's empowerment. The new season puts a significant emphasis on the need to have women involved in decision-making processes in order to improve the status of women in Angola.

SFCG Angola thanks the following donors for their support