Eliana La Ferrara

Eliana La Ferrara’s areas of expertise range from social mobility and counteracting stereotypes to state functioning within fragile environments. A focus point in her work is finding ways to help people deal with constraints that may be detrimental for their wellbeing.

Interview

Aspirations trap

Escape the aspirations trap

A focus point in Eliana La Ferrara’s work is finding ways to help people escape the poverty trap. She found that one way to do this is to learn more about people’s aspirations.
The traditional view, explains La Ferrara, assumes that limited resources are the reason people get stuck in poverty. Individuals who are poor will have low investment, for example in education, and that will keep them poor. The solution may seem simple, that the way out of poverty is through additional resources and higher income. According to La Ferrara, that view is far too short-sighted.

Edutainment

The power of edutainment

Edutainment, which La Ferrara describes as a combination of education and entertainment, is the idea that media can be entertaining while conveying an educational message.
Her work on edutainment began with an unsuspecting type of media: soap operas. In the 1960s, telenovelas gradually entered Brazil, one municipality after the other. The families shown on TV were vastly different from the typical Brazilian families at that time. The female characters portrayed on the show usually had one or no children, while there were many children in most Brazilian families. Data showed that fertility rates in cities receiving this type of programme started dropping.
Following up on this Eliana collaborated with a Nigerian production company to develop an edutainment programme centered on the topic of HIV prevention. The results were striking. People who watched the telenovela not only knew more about how to protect themselves against HIV and how to treat the disease, there was also an increase in test rates and in use of contraception.