Loyola Productions Scaling the Heights: A Successful Catholic Media Initiative in Africa

CANAA || By Pamela Adinda || 10 March 2016

Religious congregations working in developing countries are known to excel in various fields offering different services to communities. Media productions, both print and electronic, are one such service being successfully provided by religious congregations.

In Malawi, for instance, Montfort Media, publishers of the Lamp, Together and Mkwaso newsletters, are well known for one of the biggest printing presses in the country. The Montfort Missionaries also run a national Catholic TV station, TV Luntha.

In Zambia, Loyola Productions owned by the Jesuits is a well-known Catholic media production throughout the country and beyond. The founder, Father Charles Chilinda, SJ, said that he felt the absence of the Catholic Church in the media especially television and this motivated him to think seriously of making a change.

“If you live in Zambia you will realize that in the late 1990s (and) early 2000s the media was really saturated with Pentecostals and Evangelicals (in) radio stations as well as TV stations. TBN came in and people were watching all these kinds of things but the effort by the Catholic Church to build a presence in television was very little and actually we disappeared from the television per se,” Fr. Chilinda explained.

The idea of a multiplicity of people involved in communications, and something that was not directly under the Catholic Secretariat, with a very different spirituality and approach, came to his mind and his determination with the blessings of his congregation, the Jesuits, led to the establishment of a Catholic television production house.

Loyola Productions around the world

Fr. Chilinda explained that the establishment of Loyola Productions in Zambia was also inspired by the other Jesuits who have been involved in different types of productions around the world.

“When I went to school in the Los Angeles, there was a Loyola Productions which exists to date. So among all of us who were studying media, there was a guy from Germany, one from Italy and myself, a Zambian, and there was this American who had started a Loyola Productions. So we thought, why don’t we multiply this around the world then we can network?” Fr. Chilinda explained how he informally agreed with his friends to start Loyola Productions in Italy, Germany and Zambia.

With a renewed zeal from America, Fr. Chilinda was determined to realize a dream which he was confident would succeed.

“I didn’t want to be inhibited in doing that which I had wanted to do all my life by structures that were there. I just wanted to let my gifts and my talents and desires blossom,” he recalled the inspiration behind the setting up of Loyola Productions.

A car with a quarter tank of fuel

Upon his return to Zambia in 2004, Fr. Chilinda shared his idea with his Provincial Superior who felt that setting up a communications office rather than a TV production unit was a better idea since the congregation was trying to promote the communications media as a channel of evangelization. But this did not deter his zeal and so he went ahead and started putting up things in place to begin production.

“I had nothing. I had just come back home and all I had were small things that I had gathered: a camera, a tripod, a computer, (some) software and a microphone. I had a stereo in my room and I brought it to the office because I needed to use the speakers and the office was only one room that I was given at the parish. Luckily enough, the province gave me a car and that was the only investment I was given, a car with a quarter tank of fuel.”

Fr. Chilinda faced the challenge of swimming in the sea with very little resources as he had only 10,000 dollars, which he had returned with from America; he relied on little contributions from well-wishers and fortunately, albeit slowly, things started taking shape. He managed to recruit a friend he had worked with before at Yatsani Studios, which belongs to the Zambian Bishops Conference and who had since come out of the job and was looking for another.

“We did a production dubbed ‘Lives of charity’ for the Bambino Sisters and it meant that we had to go to all their communities and all their apostolates in Zambia and Zimbabwe to see the work that the sisters were doing, reflecting their lives and what they did. This was our first production which was a religious video and thereafter we did a bit of coverage of events here and there,” he shared.

Fr. Chilinda said he was very confident about the project and from the beginning told his Provincial Superior as well as the man he recruited to assist him that they did not need donor money for production.

“It has always been my belief that any media organization should be able to support and sustain itself. If for two years we cannot raise enough money to sustain the operations through the works that we do then we should close shop,” he said, adding that all that they needed at that time and which he requested from his superiors was a bit of money for capital expenses.

“So, we had two strong approaches: one was to do commercial work on topics and issues we were convinced were in consonance with our own values and beliefs and raising money from there to support our operations,” he explained.

The big breakthrough

An opportunity presented itself through Barclays Bank, something that Fr. Chilinda termed as the work of Providence.

“So you know the way God works. He opens windows of opportunity where as human beings you think it is impossible. Barclays Bank had a project called Miles Ahead and they were going from England through all the countries where Barclays had branches; from Kenya then Tanzania and into Zambia. We followed this team when they entered Zambia and covered their events up to the time that they left. We filmed them and edited all that so that each day there was something on national television,” Fr. Chilinda recalled.

This was such a big challenge to Barclays Bank owing to the fact that our production house was just a tiny entity made up of two people.

“The project was a success and what stood out was the quality of our work. The productions were not like something done ordinarily by other production houses and therefore people started consulting about Loyola Productions and that marketed us,” Father Chilinda revealed.

Loyola Productions has grown ever since and has managed to produce regular programs for the national television thereby putting a Catholic Church presence in media space dominated by evangelicals.

“We targeted two events in the life of the Church, that is, Advent and Christmas (and) Lent and Easter. In those seasons, we would put something on television every single week and we’ve been doing that all along. So we produce programs with religious sisters, priests or a combination of both and then we package the programs and put them on television,” Chilinda said.

The venture is however very demanding and also costly because the national television charges for airtime.

Programs for the Advent, Christmas, Lenten and Easter seasons produced at Loyola Productions are not only viewed in Zambia but also across in Malawi.

The director of Luntha TV in Malawi, Father Andrew Kaufa confirmed that they get content for the national TV station in Malawi from Loyola Productions.

Famed for its quality productions, Loyola Productions has earned credibility from the government, NGOs as well as the private sector.

“We’ve worked on social projects with the telephone companies, the mines, the NGOs, health sector, development, tourism and that way we’ve been all round doing social advocacy in issues that people deal with in day today life,” Fr. Chilinda said.

“Right now we are in the process of producing a documentary on gender-based violence and its ugly nature and what the government is doing to address this issue. Every week we do a health-based program and I think there is no area that we have not covered.”

Scaling the heights

So far other people have come on board and Loyola Production is now a big entity, scaling the heights.

“I got money from the California Province to fulfill my dream of having a full production house where we can do drama, soap operas, and anything else within the same building,” Fr. Chilinda said and added, “I think we are one of the biggest private owned studios in the country. There are challenges especially of finances but the Lord has been good to us and so far we haven’t closed shop.”