LocationsTelevision as a Tool for Social Change:
Evidence from Kashf Foundation's House Full Batti Gul and Zard Patton Ka Bunn
By Roshaneh Zafar | Founder and Managing Director, Kashf Foundation
Kashf's media strategy is specifically positioned as a counter-narrative intervention, producing content that centres women's agency, aspiration, and dignity, and demonstrates the enabling role of male allies in women's development.
Kashf Foundation is a leading microfinance institution in Pakistan, dedicated to empowering low-income communities, particularly women, through financial services and social development programs. Established in 1996, Kashf is Pakistan's first specialized microfinance institution and is now recognized as a pioneering edutainment organization, having produced several television dramas and a growing portfolio of digital media content.
Television as a tool in Pakistan
Television is a natural vehicle for social change in Pakistan, where user penetration stands at approximately 70 percent of the population and cable penetration in urban areas reaches 97 percent. For low-income households, the primetime drama serial is the primary window through which complex social issues enter household discourse.
Within Kashf's media campaigns portfolio, the television serial drama is identified as the highest-value instrument in terms of outreach and behavioural influence. A serial drama sustains audience engagement over weeks and months, builds emotional identification with characters over time, and creates the conditions for a normative shift that cannot be achieved through single-episode or campaign-format content.
Mainstream drama serials in Pakistan have long been criticized for reinforcing patriarchal norms—normalizing women's worth through marriage, sacrifice, and obedience; romanticizing physical abuse; and perpetuating the 'good woman as eternally patient victim' archetype. Consistent exposure to such narratives not only normalizes but solidifies these patterns as socially acceptable. Kashf's media strategy is specifically positioned as a counter-narrative intervention, producing content that centres women's agency, aspiration, and dignity, and demonstrates the enabling role of male allies in women's development.
Kashf's television programme portfolio spans eight productions to date, each targeting a distinct but interconnected set of social issues:
Two Productions, One Important Conversation
Pakistan is the fifth most populous country in the world; the country adds nearly four million people per year. Rapid population growth places pressure on healthcare, natural resources, education, and household economies. Yet, public opinion about family planning remains affected by stigma, religious sensitivities, and entrenched cultural norms.
A. House Full Batti Gul: Domestic Realism as a Vehicle for Population Discourse
House Full Batti Gul was produced as a five-episode mini web series to address Pakistan's population growth challenge through intimate domestic storytelling rather than public health messaging. The series' intervention logic is grounded in the principle that information embedded in emotionally resonant narrative reaches audiences that would disengage from direct instruction on the same topic.
Set in a closely-knit muhalla (locality) in Karachi, the series follows three women—Qurrat, Seema, and Bano—whose lives are bound together by shared walls, shared anxieties, and shared resilience. The narrative deliberately situates its social messaging within the textures of everyday domestic life: infertility and its social stigma; the disproportionate social pressure to produce male children; superstition in reproductive decision-making; and the reality of child abandonment. These themes unfold against a structural backdrop of energy crisis and economic strain, making the macro-level consequences of population pressure legible through the micro-level experiences of individual characters.
The series was designed with a specific behavioural objective: to lower the threshold for household conversations about family planning. In communities where contraception, child spacing, and reproductive autonomy remain deeply taboo, the drama functions as a shared reference point that allows viewers to raise these topics obliquely, through the characters' experiences rather than their own.
B. Zard Patton Ka Bunn: Structural Inequality and the Interconnected Determinants of Women's Agency
Zard Patton Ka Bunn represents a more expansive intervention, addressing the interlocking structural determinants of women's agency rather than a single behavioural target.
Set in a rural, conservative community in Bahawalpur, the narrative follows Meenu, a young woman who aspires to a career in medicine in the face of resistance from her brothers and the patriarchal milieu in which she lives. The drama's thematic architecture is explicitly designed to highlight the interconnections among girls' education, maternal health and family planning awareness, maternal mortality and the role of skilled birth attendants, women's mobility and economic participation, child labor, and access to justice.
This structural design reflects Kashf's theoretical position that the social determinants of women's disempowerment are not discrete and sequential but mutually reinforcing and simultaneous. A girl denied education is a woman denied economic participation; a household without access to family planning is a household exposed to compounding vulnerabilities of poverty, maternal risk, and child labor. The drama does not present this analysis as instruction but instead embeds it in Meenu's journey and lets viewers arrive at these connections through identification and emotional engagement.
The character of Dr. Nofil serves a deliberate function within the drama's behavioural change architecture: as a model of positive masculinity. His inclusion as a depiction of male characters who actively support women's rights generates stronger normative effects than depicting male characters who are simply absent from the equation of change.
Measurable Impact
Kashf Foundation undertook a third-party assessment for Zard Patton Ka Bunn with 500 respondents across Lahore and Karachi.
The most consequential finding was the self-reported movement from attitudinal shift to social action—the conversion of changed beliefs into changed conduct.
Beyond the specific issues addressed, 73% of respondents reported paying closer attention to how women are treated in their own households and communities after watching the drama.
This shift in social observation—nearly three in four viewers becoming more actively attentive to gender norms around them—represents perhaps the most durable finding of the assessment. It suggests that Zard Patton Ka Bunn did not simply deliver messages about specific issues. It recalibrated the lens through which viewers see their own social world.
