HIV Prevention · Behaviour Change · Transgender Community

UNFPA Pakistan · Lahore & Karachi · Multi-City

Apni Kahani

HIV Prevention Animation Series for Pakistan’s Transgender Community

A six-part animation drama series, built on 90 days of ethnographic co-creation with Pakistan’s Khawaja Sira community — designed not to lecture, but to open a conversation that had never been possible before.

Year2019 - 2020

ClientUNFPA Pakistan

CommunityKhawaja Sira (Transgender) Community

FocusHIV Prevention & Safe Behaviour Change

White Rice RoleResearch, Co-Creation & Creative Lead

All Work

Our Role

Human-Centred Design & Creative Lead

White Rice led the full design and production cycle — from 90 days of immersive ethnographic research and co-creation with the Khawaja Sira community, through to scripting, illustration, animation production, voiceover casting, and peer educator facilitation design. Every element of the series was built with the community, not for them.

Ethnographic ResearchHuman-Centred DesignCommunity Co-CreationScript & Storyline DevelopmentAnimation ProductionIllustration & Visual DesignPeer Educator Facilitation GuideBehaviour Change Strategy

6 Episodes

A complete animation drama series — Pakistan’s first culturally grounded HIV prevention content for the Khawaja Sira community.

90 Days

Of immersive ethnographic research across Lahore and Karachi — 50+ days of direct observation, shadowing, and in-community co-creation.

30–40 Min

Average peer-facilitated conversation triggered by each 5–6 minute episode — with concrete commitments and action agreements by participants.

National Standard

The series became the standard conversation-starter tool for HIV prevention engagement with the Khawaja Sira community across Pakistan.

Community Voice

All voiceovers performed by actual Khawaja Sira community members — creating an authenticity no external production could replicate.

High
Prevalence.
Deep
Silence.

At the time of this programme, HIV prevalence among Pakistan’s transgender community was critically high — and safe practice rates were critically low. The barrier was not access to information. It was a combination of deep social taboo, community mistrust of health systems, the shame associated with open discussion, and the absence of any content that felt like it was made for — and by — this community.

The Challenge

Pakistan's Khawaja Sira community lives at the intersection of multiple vulnerabilities — social marginalisation, economic precarity, and a healthcare system that has historically failed to serve them with dignity or cultural competence. HIV prevention programming aimed at this community had repeatedly failed — not because the information was wrong, but because the approach was fundamentally broken.

Existing materials were generic, clinical, and created entirely without community input. They used neither the community's own language — Farsi — nor their cultural references, social dynamics, or the specific scenarios in which unsafe behaviours actually occurred. Myths were widespread. Screening was avoided. Peer conversations on the subject were almost nonexistent.

The challenge was not a communications problem. It was a trust problem, a representation problem, and a shame problem — all of which required a fundamentally different design approach.

Standard awareness campaigns don't work when the community has never seen themselves represented, has no reason to trust the messenger, and carries a lifetime of shame around the subject being discussed.

The Strategy

Before a single frame was drawn or a line of script written, White Rice spent three months inside the community. The research phase was not a needs assessment — it was an act of deep listening. The team used immersive human-centred design and ethnographic methods across Lahore and Karachi to understand the community not as a health target group, but as a complex social world with its own culture, language, relationships, and logic.

Entertainment Over Instruction

Drama and storytelling to create emotional engagement first — making the content something the community wanted to watch, not something they were made to sit through.

Peer-Led Facilitation

A community peer educator — not a health worker or outsider — as the bridge between the content and the conversation it needed to unlock.

Radical Cultural Authenticity

Farsi language in the script. Real-life community scenarios. Illustrations co-created with the community. Voiceovers performed by community members themselves.

Indirect Approach to a Taboo Subject

Tackle HIV and safe practice through the side door — showing real scenarios, letting characters navigate real dilemmas, and allowing the facilitated conversation to do the work of direct discussion.

The Intervention · Six-Part Animation Series

Apni Kahani — A Drama in Six Episodes

Episode One

Community & Belonging

Establishes the world — the dera, the guru-chela relationship, the social fabric of community life — through characters the audience immediately recognise as their own.

Episode Two

The Myth and the Fear

A character encounters misinformation about HIV transmission. The episode dramatises how myths spread — and the real cost of leaving them unchallenged.

Episode Three

The Moment of Choice

A real-life scenario in which a character faces a decision about safe practice — showing the social pressures, the hesitation, and what support from a peer can change.

Episode Four

Seeking Help

The journey of accessing screening — the fear, the stigma, the barriers — and the relief of a peer who has been through it guiding the way forward.

Episode Five

What We Don’t Say

A story about silence — within the community — and the cost of not talking. Designed to surface the conversations the facilitated session then brings into the open.

Episode Six

Our Responsibility

A forward-looking close — showing collective action, peer support, and what a community looks like when it decides to protect itself together.

Each episode ran 5–6 minutes and was followed by a peer educator-facilitated session using a structured question guide co-designed with the community. What began as a short screening consistently became a 30–40 minute conversation — with participants identifying specific actions, making personal commitments, and agreeing on collective next steps. The episode was not the intervention. The conversation it opened was.

Built with the community.
Not for them.

Every design decision in this programme — from the storylines to the visual style to the language used — was validated, iterated, and approved by the Khawaja Sira community through multiple rounds of real-time co-creation and testing.

This was not a token consultation. It was the design methodology.

Farsi Language Integration

The Khawaja Sira community has its own distinct language — Farsi. Scripts were developed with community members to ensure authentic use of vocabulary, idiom, and tone that the audience would immediately recognise as their own.

Community Voiceovers

All character voiceovers were performed by actual Khawaja Sira community members — not professional voice actors. This single decision transformed the content’s credibility from the first moment of screening.

Illustrations Co-Created in Community

Visual characters, settings, and design elements were developed iteratively with community input — ensuring that when members watched the animation, they saw themselves, not a generic approximation.

Real Stories, Real Scenarios

Storylines were drawn directly from real experiences shared during the research phase — grounding every episode in situations the community had actually lived, not scenarios imagined by external designers.

The Impact

The most important measure of this programme's success is not reach — it is what happened in the room. A six-minute episode, shown to a group of Khawaja Sira community members facilitated by a peer they trusted, consistently produced thirty to forty minutes of open, substantive conversation about a subject that had previously been unspeakable in community settings.

National Tool

The series became the standard HIV prevention conversation-starter for the Khawaja Sira community across Pakistan — adopted and used consistently across all outreach and engagement.

30–40 Min

Average peer-facilitated conversation per 5–6 minute episode — with community members identifying actions and making personal and collective commitments.

Trust Built

By ensuring community members voiced their own characters and co-created every element, the content achieved an immediate authenticity that broke down barriers no external campaign had managed.

Conversation Opened

For the first time, community groups across Pakistan had a structured, emotionally safe, peer-led format for talking openly about HIV, safe practice, and screening.

The episode was five minutes. The conversation that followed was forty. That is the gap this programme was designed to open.

Apni Kahani created the conditions for a conversation that had never been possible before — built on three months of deep listening, radical co-creation, and the conviction that a community's own voice is the most powerful behaviour change tool there is.

You cannot change a behaviour
you cannot yet talk about.

Apni Kahani created the conditions for a conversation that had never been possible before — built on three months of deep listening, radical co-creation, and the conviction that a community’s own voice is the most powerful behaviour change tool there is.

HIV PreventionBehaviour ChangeTransgender CommunityKhawaja SiraAnimationHuman-Centred DesignEthnographic ResearchPeer EducationCo-CreationUNFPASDG 3Pakistan

Next Project

Clean & Green Punjab

Punjab Government & UNICEF