Scaling failures are not failures of ambition. The funding and the political may be there, the pilot worked. What goes wrong is further down the line: the parts that get edited out, usually the parts that made the intervention work in the first place. This happens through a series of reasonable-looking compromises, and by then, the intervention has been ‘scaled’ but its key ingredients have not.
Entertainment changes behaviour through mechanisms we understand well. Narrative persuasion lowers cognitive defences, so ideas enter without the resistance a health message would trigger. Identification maps audiences onto characters. Modelling means we learn vicariously from watching consequences play out on someone else. Emotional arousal cements the storyline in memory.
When researchers tracked what happened after girls in Uganda watched Queen of Katwe, the 2016 film based on Phiona Mutesi, who picked up chess at nine in a Kampala slum and went on to compete internationally, the girls who saw it went on to perform measurably better in their exams (Riley, 2022). One film. A measurable shift in educational attainment. You can see why the sector loves this.
