Media Over Intermediaries: Edutainment, Gender, and Social Change in Upper Egypt 

Can narrative entertainment dislodge harmful practices-and if so, how can such changes be measured unobtrusively? We report results from a randomized edutainment intervention in Egypt, in which participants were assigned to view a state-backed drama targeting female genital mutilation (FGM) and early marriage, family planning, or a placebo storyline. Outcomes were measured through surveys and interviewerblinded conversations six months later, analyzed at scale using large language models. The FGM drama increased opposition to the practice, driven by corrections to health and religious misperceptions-corrections the state cannot reliably engineer through local intermediaries, who undermine it. Effects for family planning, which does not face such opposition, were weak and inconsistent. Interview-based measures reveal the spontaneous salience of FGM without elevated signs of respondent re-traumatization. Edutainment works when the state lacks trusted messengers on the ground, and these boosts can be ethically captured by incorporating open-ended measurement into experimental evaluations.