Sexto Sentido & Somos Diferentes, Somos Iguales — Puntos de Encuentro's Edutainment Strategy, Nicaragua

Nicaraguan NGO Puntos de Encuentro built its Somos Diferentes, Somos Iguales ("We're Different, We're Equal") communication-for-social-change strategy around Sexto Sentido, an 80-episode youth telenovela broadcast nationally from 2001 to 2005, combined with radio programming, printed materials and community outreach addressing gender norms, HIV and violence against women and girls (VAWG).

The storylines followed a group of Nicaraguan adolescents through family conflict, first relationships, unplanned pregnancy and gender-based violence, deliberately modelling more gender-equitable relationships and signposting real support services and legal rights for survivors of violence, rather than simply raising awareness through advertising.

An inter-institutional evaluation team — PATH, the Population Council's Horizons Program and the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua-León's Center for Demographic and Health Research (CIDS), with Puntos de Encuentro — ran a three-year longitudinal panel survey of 4,500 young people aged 13–24, published by Solórzano and colleagues in 2008.

Nine in ten respondents recognised at least one component of the strategy, with 59% of the panel classified as having greater exposure to it. Young people with greater exposure showed a significantly larger shift toward gender-equitable attitudes — for example, less agreement that women alone should be responsible for housework and childcare — alongside greater awareness of Nicaragua's VAWG laws and of where survivors could seek services.

Because the evaluation compared young people by level of media exposure rather than through a randomised or geographically matched control group, the attitude shifts are correlational rather than definitively causal, and the panel measured self-reported attitudes and awareness rather than directly observed reductions in violence; no formal cost-effectiveness analysis was located.