Educational Audiovisuals (AVE) - Bolivia

In its materials and training sessions, AVE uses fiction, humor, and didactic methods to focus on the specific problems, needs, aspirations, ways of thinking, and perspectives of those who participate in and benefit from these projects. Involving children and teenagers as actors is one way in which AVE makes community participation a priority. Specific topics featured in AVE's materials include health, agriculture, human relationships, sexual education, ecology, laws, national culture (weaving, masks, costumes, painting), and social problems (gender, abandoned children, alcoholism, drug abuse, migration, etc).

As part of this effort to involve and respond to Bolivian people, AVE has created a permanent place for art and communications in one of the lowest income sections of Cochabamba. Approximately 120 children and adolescents work in this area. This centre provides a home for painting, acting, puppetry, music and radio production, and the creation of posters and videos. Approximately 30 children and teenagers each day attend workshops or participate in activities coordinated by the instructors and permanent staff. For example, radio programmes and musical creations are recorded in the sound studio or homework is done with a teacher in the study room. In the covered patio, young artists share paint and participate in traditional games. In other rooms, there are theater rehearsals and music or video production sessions. Once a week, an activity (a mini-workshop, film, lecture, or art exhibit) is held in this space for working children.

AVE also offers workshops for leaders, instructors, members of women's organisations, school counselors, workers, peasants, district groups, students, and communications professionals. Instruction is fundamentally practical and participatory, and covers topics like:

• Audiovisual production: audiovisual techniques and video
• Radio production
• Visual arts: drawing, painting, posters
• Literary arts: poetry, creative writing
• Communication: popular communication, debates, TV production and planning, investigative reporting, sound
• Legal: Educational Reform
• Prevention: drug abuse and alcoholism
• Health-related and social issues, with a specific emphasis on youth, sexual education, parents and kids, women.

Development Issues
Children, Youth, Education, Child Protection.

AVE has participated in or contributed to 2,300 educational slide shows and events, which have reached over 250,000 people in urban and rural areas. AVE has a stock of 61 audiovisuals, 37 video films, 18 radio programmes, and 800 photographs, as well as an archive of 7,500 slides, puppets, musical instruments, posters, poems, stories, recorded testimonies, and drawings. It has rented over 1,800 such materials to 50 educational NGOs. One hundred workshops have been conducted.