• Evidence from five independent data sources indicates that the educational content of Twende na Wakati (Let's Go with the Times) had measurable effects on listeners' adoption of contraceptive methods and played an important role in the early stage of Tanzania's transition from very high to lower fertility rates.
  
• Twende na Wakati is the first entertainment-education project to be evaluated in a national field experiment and only the second to promote the inter-related health issues of family planning and HIV/AIDS prevention through the same mass communication intervention. The study, "Effects of an Entertainment-Education Radio Soap Opera on Family Planning Behavior in Tanzania," appears in the September 1999 issue of Studies in Family Planning, a peer-reviewed journal published by The Population Council.
  
• Married women who listened to Twende na Wakati were more than twice as likely to adopt family planning than those who did not listen to the program. Non-listeners were only half as likely to engage in frequent discussions about family planning.
  
• Survey data from over 2,700 respondents each in the comparison and treatment areas for Twende na Wakati indicate that listening to the program stimulated the factor known as "self-efficacy" related to family size determination, increasing Tanzanians' ideal age at marriage for women, approval of contraceptive use, spousal communication about family planning, and current practice of family planning.
  
• From 1993 to 1995, Tanzanians' belief in their ability to determine family size increased 11 percentage points in the program's treatment area, versus a six point increase in the comparison area. After the soap opera was broadcast in the Dodoma comparison region from 1995-97, such self-efficacy increased there by 19 percentage points.
  
• Data from 79 family planning clinics indicate that Twende na Wakati increased both new and continuing family planning visits to Ministry of Health clinics in Tanzania, and provide direct evidence that the soap opera was the source of referral for approximately 25 percent of all new clients.
  
• Approximately 23 percent of Tanzania's adult population listened regularly to Twende na Wakati, with the average listener tuning in at least once a week. Among the research sample, regular listenership increased from 47 percent in 1994 to 58 percent in 1997.
  
• Individual women's greater involvement in listening to and discussing the program paralleled increases in discussing family planning with her spouse and using a contraceptive method.
  
• Tanzania's population grew from 7.7 million in 1948 to 27.4 million in 1992, when the government implemented a comprehensive family planning strategy aiming to reduce the country's population growth rate to less than 2 percent per year by 2010, mainly by increasing contraceptive prevalence. The government program provided free contraceptive services at 2,700 Ministry of Health clinics, but national contraceptive prevalence averages remained low at an average of ten percent. This figure increased to 18 percent by 1996.

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