Communicating development – Page 39

Arthur C Clarke: My Vision for Sri Lanka in 2048

Sir Arthur Clarke, who died last week, was buried at Colombo general cemetery at his request. That ended a 52-year-long association the author had with his adopted home.

His interest in diving and underwater exploration led him to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where he settled down in 1956. He pioneered diving and underwater tourism in Sri Lanka through his company Underwater Safaris, and played an active role as a public intellectual and as a patron of art, science and higher education. He served as Chancellor of Sri Lanka’s technological University of Moratuwa from 1979 to 2002.

Although he became the island nation’s first Resident Guest in 1975, Sir Arthur always remained a British citizen. The Sri Lankan government presented him the Lankabhimanya (‘Pride of Lanka’), the country’s highest civilian honour, in 2005. In December 2007, government officials, scientists, artistes and diplomats came together to felicitate Sir Arthur on his 90th birthday.

During the past few days, there was a good deal of coverage, editorialising and reminiscing in the Sri Lankan media about Sir Arthur, whom a former foreign minister once called a ‘one man cheering squad for Sri Lanka’. Most of this coverage looked back to recall the highlights and anecdotes of the sarong-clad, table tennis playing, myth-busting icon.

As Sir Arthur would have said, that was necessary – but not sufficient. His business was talking about the future and helping to shape it. So I dug up from my own archives a 1,100-word essay that I had written for The Sunday Observer in Sri Lanka a decade ago, for a series titled Sri Lanka in 2048. There, leading artistes, scientists and other public figures were asked to outline their personal vision for the year Sri Lanka would complete 100 years of political independence (the series marked the Golden Jubilee of this event).

Upon re-reading the essay, which was in Sir Arthur’s first person narrative, I found that it was still fully valid, and even more relevant a decade later than when it was first written. So I passed this on to Pramod de Silva, editor of The Daily News, the sister newspaper of the Observer, which ran it on 22 March 2008 – the day of Sir Arthur’s funeral. I found that quite appropriate – the physical remains were going on their final odyssey, but Sir Arthur’s vision would – hopefully – propel Sri Lanka to a better future for decades to come.

Here’s how he opened the essay, My Vision for Sri Lanka in 2048:

“A guest must be careful about what he says of the host: contrary to popular perception, I am not a Sri Lankan citizen — only a resident guest. Yet, having lived here for 41 of my 80 years, I now regard this alone as home, and have visions and hopes for my adopted land.

“Half of all Sri Lankans alive today were not even born when, in December 1954, I had my first glimpse of the then Ceylon — when the P&O liner Himalaya carrying me to the Great Barrier Reef paused at the Colombo harbour for half a day. What I saw on a single afternoon tempted me to come back a year later to explore, and by the end of the 1950s, I had developed a life long love affair with the island.”

Taking stock of Sri Lanka’s already high human development indicators, Sir Arthur noted:
“It has been said that the biggest remaining challenge in terms of human health and welfare is not so much to add years to life, but to add life to years. For a country like Sri Lanka that has already achieved high levels of life expectancy and other impressive social indicators, this is indeed the next major challenge. The vision for the next fifty years should be to develop ways of improving the quality of life of all Sri Lankans. Difficult though it certainly is, such development will have meaning only if it is socially and environmentally sound.”

He then talked about two areas that were crucial for the socio-economic development of his adoptive land: energy and telecommunications. But he knew these physical improvements would not, by themselves, create a better society until and unless lasting peace could be achieved:
“The biggest challenge for all Sri Lankans in the coming century would be achieving better communications and understanding among the different ethnic, religious and cultural groups and sub-groups all of who call this their motherland. For material progress and economic growth would come to nothing if we allow the primitive forces of territoriality and aggression to rule our minds.“

Read the full essay on the Daily News website

Photos by Rohan de Silva, Sir Arthur’s personal photographer

One year of blogging: Looking back and forward

Today, 17 March 2008, this blog completes one year online.

It was a year ago today that I wrote my first blog post, Children of Tsunami go to go Washington, from Alexandria, Virginia, USA, where I was staying with a dear friend while attending the DC Environmental Film Festival.

Some 366 days, 213 posts and over 63,800 page visits later, I can say it’s been an interesting – sometimes exhilerating – ride. I will expand on this post as soon as I have a chance, but for now I want to say Thank You to all my readers, and especially those who joined in our on-going conversation.

Moving Images was not exactly my first blog – in late 2006 I had started another blog called Communicating Majority World under the name ‘Lost Alien’, which I somehow didn’t sustain for more than a few weeks and a handful of posts. For reasons that I can no longer quite clearly recall, the Lost Alien abandoned his blog – and migrated over here!

I can only hope that some alien friends are among my current blog’s visitors…

The Meatrix Reality: Mixing animation, activism and spoof

When I gave up eating all meat nearly 15 years ago, I had some explaining to do.

Breaking away from the pack is never that easy. Friends and colleagues wanted to know if I had suddenly gone religious (most certainly not: I practise no religion and frown upon all); or become an animal-hugger (well, not quite); or if I was too sick to eat a ‘normal diet’ anymore.

That last one was closer to the truth. I became a partial vegetarian because I wanted to stay healthy. I realised how unhygienic meat production and distribution were in my part of the world, and yes, I was also sensitive about the excessive cruelty to animals who end up on dining tables.

And it’s not just in Asia that organised meat production is increasingly hazardous to human health (not to mention the untold suffering by farm animals and the growing power of big agri-business companies). Animal rights and environmental activists have been pointing these out for years. And as powerful documentaries like Fast Food Nation (2006) documented, it is not only meat that’s crushed in the powerful mincing machine, but the whole of society.

But just how do we carry this message to the young Digital Natives who are the most eager consumers of meat and fast food? As we discussed some months ago, the big challenge is to take complex development issues in the right durations (shorter the better) and right formats (mixed or pure entertainment).

The Meatrix Moopheus

I was delighted, therefore, to belatedly discover the innovative and insightful series called The Meatrix. Funnily, I heard about it from two sources almost at the same time. A Malaysian activist I was visiting in Georgetown, Penang, last week highly recommended it. Two days later, my colleague Manori Wijesekera returned from having screened one of our own films at the 16th Earth Vision Film Festival in Tokyo – where The Meatrix was a finalist in the children’s environmental film category.

The Meatrix is an animated spoof on The Matrix trilogy (1999 – 2003). It uses humor and thinly veiled characters and situations from the original Matrix films to educate the uninitiated about factory farms.

Evidently, it was made with the blessings of the Wachowski brothers who created the science fiction thriller series. The first animation, The Meatrix, starts when Moopheus the Cow finds Leo the Pig at a family farm and informs him that corporations are taking over the way farms used to be. By taking the blue pill, Leo can remain at ease in his current situation, or by taking the red pill, Leo can see just how far the rabbit hole goes. (Of course, the good Leo takes the red one.)

Watch the first animation on YouTube:

In this case, the Meatrix is the illusion created by big time agricultural corporations who have taken over most family-run farms in the west, and turned them into ruthless factories producing meat and dairy products. Those who take on the Meatrix – at grave risk to their life and limbs – reveal how these factory farms are pumping steroids, antibiotics and growth hormones to maximise production, exposing unsuspecting consumers to major health risks like mad cow disease and antiobiotic resistance.

There are two short sequels to the original Meatrix: The Meatrix II: Revolting, and The Meatrix II½. They all pack action, suspense and even a bit of romance….just like the Matrix films did. And all the Meatrix animations are under five minutes in duration – just right for the fast media generation!

The Meatrix is collaboration between GRACE (Global Resource Action Center for the Environment) and Free Range, a cutting-edge design company with a social conscience. It’s the mission of GRACE to eliminate factory farming and to preach the message that sustainable agriculture is both a better environmental and economic choice for rural communities.

In February of 2003, Free Range developed the Free Range Flash Activism Grant, offering the prize of a flash movie production to forward the work of a worthy nonprofit. GRACE was the first recipient, in recognition of its important work on farm reform.

When The Meatrix I launched in November 2003, the viral grassroots film broke new ground in online advocacy, creating a unique vehicle in which to educate, entertain and motivate people to create change. The Meatrix movies have been translated into more than 30 languages and are now the most successful online advocacy films ever with over 15 million viewers worldwide.

Get involved – what you can do to stop the Meatrix from marching on and on to restaurants and homes of the world

The Meatrix animations and the interactive website built around them are fine examples of crossing the other digital divide (between Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives) that I have been writing about. This is Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) with none of the pomposity and preaching of UN agencies and other development organisations who are, sadly, trapped in their own version of a Verbiage Matrix where text, text and more text seems to be their whole reality.

It’s time some of our development friends took a red pill to see what lies outside their charmed and illusory circles.

PS: By the way, I still eat fish and other seafood, largely because on my frequent travels in Asia I turn up in places where being a complete vegetarian is simply not realistic (try Korea, for example). I now say I eat only those creatures that swim, but none that walks on land. One of these days, I will give up temptations for all flesh…

Unseen women, unheard agonies

In January 2008, I wrote about Lakshmi and Me, a recent Indian documentary that portrayed a domestic worker woman whom my friend Kalpana Sharma aptly called an invisible superwoman.

A colleague who read my piece reminded me about a series of five short films on working women in Sri Lanka that I had executive produced in 1999-2000. Produced originally in Sinhala for a national audience, the series was titled Oba Nodutu Eya (The Unseen Woman). In fact, it featured not one but several women workers in two different sectors in the country’s informal economy: the coconut husk (coir) industry in the south and agricultural settlements in the Dry Zone in the north-central areas of the island.

The following is adapted from a story I wrote about this series for a book that TVE Asia Pacific published in 2002. I have not gone back to my sources to check how much – or how little – has changed in the past several years.

This is Yasawathie. She has suffered physical and mental abuse most of her adult life. Her alcoholic husband beat her regularly for years, but she dared not complain for fear of reprisal.

“He injured my head, stabbed me and once fractured my arm” she says, showing a scar of a healed wound.

As if this suffering was not enough, she lost sight in one eye a few years ago in a bizarre hospital accident. She had gone to the government hospital seeking treatment for a chest ailment. There were more patients than beds, so she was forced to sleep on the floor. While sleeping, a nurse carelessly dropped a saline stand on to Yasawathie’s face.

The entire incident was hushed up, and the poor woman was intimidated into silence. “Sometimes patients even die at our hands,” the nurse told her threateningly.

Injured by the healthcare system, battered by her own husband and pressurised by her family circles to keep quiet about, this middle aged Sri Lankan woman has run out of options. She was not aware she could claim damages for the accidental loss of her eye. She does not realise there is legal redress for domestic violence – her family and in laws wouldn’t allow it in any case.

Sadly, Yasawathie is not alone. There are tens of thousands of women like her who live on the margins of society, and whose suffering goes largely unnoticed. The island nation is often cited as a South Asian success story: its women were the first in Asia to vote; female literacy is nearly universal; and a higher percentage of girls and young women are in school than boys.

But hidden beneath these national accomplishments, there are huge gender-based disparities and gaps, especially in economic, labour, family and property related matters. Studies have found that many women, particularly the poorer ones, don’t know their human and legal rights.

And even women who do know their civil and political rights often do not assert their right to safeguard themselves from domestic violence or gender-based discrimination in family and society.

Yasawathie’s story was one of several that were featured in a television documentary series that probed how Sri Lankan women’s economic and legal rights operate in the real world. Produced in 1999-2000 by TVE Asia Pacific in collaboration with the Sri Lanka Environmental Television Project (SLETP), the series went beyond the oft-repeated claim of women’s emancipation in Sri Lanka. It uncovered a shocking reality of wide spread rights denial, physical abuse and gender-based violence.

The series used a mixture of short drama segments, interviews and background commentary. “These films don’t offer comprehensive surveys of the situation, but they provide useful glimpses of how economic and legal rights apply at the grassroots for women,” said accomplished fim-maker Inoka Satyangani, who directed the series. “We raise broader concerns, and point out changes that society needs to make to ensure that women can assert their rights.”

Violence against women is both a public and private matter in Sri Lanka, says the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), a body of global experts which monitors whether governments are honouring their commitments to the 1981 United Nations’ Women’s Convention. Although violence affects women of every class and ethnicity, it is seldom reported.

In recent years, human rights abuses in Sri Lanka’s conflict ridden north and the east have received international scrutiny; both the government forces and Tamil Tiger rebels have committed atrocities. But violence against women is not confined to the war or the conflict-affected areas: as one rights activist has remarked, “everyone becomes part of the larger system of brutality”.

CEDAW has stressed that Sri Lanka needs specific legislation to address violence behind closed doors.

The TV series also found how women get paid less than men for agricultural manual labour, and how government-driven land development schemes favour men to inherit state land distributed among the landless. Government agricultural extension programmes help male farmers to obtain skills training, credit and subsidies while women farmers are constantly ignored. Women interviewed had stories that shattered the myth of women’s liberation and equality in Sri Lanka.

Read individual synopses of the five films in The Unseen Woman series

Read recent blog post: Half the sky, most of the suffering and seeking everyone’s attention

From footprints to handprints: Treading lightly on Earth…

Nalaka Gunawardene

This is me making an impression at the Global Knowledge 3rd Conference held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in December 2007. Everyone was asked to dip a hand in a saucer of paint and then press it on a large sheet of paper. In the end it created a montage of hand prints from people all over the world.

The idea was a neatly symbolic one, but as with everything else at the GK3 conference (and with its organiser, the GKP), it didn’t go any further. Good intentions, poor implementation.

But the same concept of hand print was used far more cleverly and innovatively at another large international conference I attended in November 2007. The 4th International Conference on Environment Education , hosted by the Government of India and co-sponsored by the UNESCO and UNEP, was held at the Centre for Environment Education (CEE), Ahmedabad. That multi-faceted event saw the launch of several initiatives, including Handprint – action towards sustainability.

The concept of Handprint is to decrease our ecological footprints by taking more actions towards Education for Sustainable Development (ESD).

Ecological Footprint (EF) as a concept has been around for over 15 years. The term and concept of Ecological Footprint were proposed in 1992 by William Rees, a Canadian professor at the University of British Columbia. In 1995, Rees and coauthor Mathis Wackernagel published Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth.

EF quantifies our demand on Nature and natural systems. It measures the amount of biologically productive land and water required to meet our demands (for food, timber, shelter), and to absorb the pollution we generate. Using this assessment, it is possible to estimate how many planet Earths it would take to support all of humanity if everybody lived a given lifestyle.

For example, if everyone aspires to European lifestyles, we are going to need three planets. And for American way of life, four.

As of now, the Earth is the only naturally habitable planet that we know and have — which drives home the point that we have to contain, and eventually reduce, our ecological footprint. Some, like this cartoonist, fear that it’s already too late…

Read Sep 2007 blog post: Talking Big Foot in Yetiland

Ecological footprint is a useful – in fact, revealing – measure of our species living beyond its ecological means. But it’s an inherently negative one. This is what promoted our colleagues at CEE – an internationally acknowledged centre for excellence in education for sustainable development – to come up with the related, but wholly more positive, concept of Handprint.

Whereas footprint measures our impact on the planet and its resources, Handprint will help quantify what we do to tread lightly on Earth — reducing our consumption of energy and resources, and being more considerate about the waste we generate.

As CEE says, there are many drivers of change to lessen the footprint. ESD is one of the important ones. Others include technology, policy, legal measures, systems and financial incentives.

Handprint is specifically a measure of ESD action. In the presence of over 1,000 officials, educators, activists and youth, Handprint was launched with the call: Increase your handprint; decrease your footprint!

A new website will soon be online at http://www.handsforchange.org, expanding on this concept.

While CEE is taking the concept to a whole new level and to millions who need to know and heed this message, the idea itself has been talked about by others for sometime.

For example, in May 2006, Alex Steffen wrote about it in the highly informative and inspirational website Worldchanging.

Steffen, who is executive editor of Worldchanging, wrote: “If we can imagine going climate negative, why can’t we imagine shrinking our ecological footprint until we zip past having any negative net ecological impact at all, until the operation of our daily lives heals the planet instead of hurts it? Until we transform, as I’ve said before, our ecological footprints into ecological handprints?”

TVE Asia Pacific‘s Saving the Planet TV series, currently in production, will feature a number of initiatives that will have a positive Handprint on the environment in selected countries in the Asia Pacific.

Clearly, Handprint is an area where interest and action will grow in the coming months and years.

Watch this space.

Photo courtesy Sasa Kralj

Governments, disasters and communication: Lead, follow or get out of the way!

The Association for Progressive Communications (APC) has just published a good review of the book I recently co-edited titled Communicating Disasters: An Asia Pacific Resource Book.

The review is written by two academics. Dr Malathi Subramanian is Former Principal, Daulat Ram College, University of Delhi, India, while Dr. Anupama Saxena is Head, Department of Political Science, Guru Ghasidas University, Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh, India.

As they remark: “The book has articles contributed by authors who do not engage in mere theoretical discussions. They draw on their rich and varied experiences working in either preparing disaster resilient communities or responding to humanitarian emergencies triggered by specific disasters in different parts of the globe.”

They add: “The eminently readable book provides first hand information about the real life situations of disaster, richly illustrated with case studies and use of professional images….The book is written in a manner that successfully sensitises the reader to the complexity of the issue of disaster management and its various nuances. After reading the book one is sure to echo the spirit of one of the contributors, Sanjana Hattotuwa: ‘We cannot prevent or predict all disasters. However, we can plan for, react to and learn from disasters when they do occur’.”

In preparation of this review, Malathi and Anupama did an email interview with me where they posed half a dozen questions on some key issues we have addressed in the book. Here is the full interview, which brings out my personal views interspersed with those of some other contributors to our multi-author book.

Question: In developing countries the governments are considered to be the nodal agencies for disaster management. In this context do you think that there is a need to advocate the integration of the National disaster management policy with the national ICT Policy to exploit the potential of ICTs before, during and after a disaster?

Yes, that certainly is the ideal, desirable scenario. But I’m not sure how soon this can become a reality, given how many of our governments think of these sectors as separate compartments – or ‘silos’ – with little or no integration. In the real world, however, these are all mixed up: people who use ICTs are affected by various disasters and the first responders – including relief workers and journalists – use various ICT tools in their work. Increasingly, we are seeing disaster affected people themselves using ICTs, especially mobile phones, to communicate with family, friends, aid officials and others from the scenes of disaster. We have documented specific instances of all this in our book and pointed out that the typical hapless, uninformed affected person is being replaced by a digitally empowered one. So the integration of disaster management and ICTs has been happening on the ground for some time, whether or not policy-makers acknowledge it!

At policy and regulatory level, governments can play an enabling role by easing the various bottlenecks that currently hold back optimum use of ICTs in disaster preparedness, early warning or response. This is so lacking and badly needed in my own country Sri Lanka. One example: amateur radio enthusiasts played a key role in establishing emergency communication with some coastal areas badly hit by the 2004 tsunami. When everything was dead, short wave was alive. Yet, barely months later, the government blocked any new amateur radio equipment being brought into the country as someone felt it was a threat to national security!

But in my view, misguided policies are worse than no policies at all. That’s when I feel like quoting Rabindranath Tagore’s words which every southern government should heed: ‘If you can lead, lead. If you cannot, follow. If you can do neither, then get out of the way’.

Question: Participatory Modes of communications form a very important part of a comprehensive strategy aiming at creating disaster resilient communities. What type of policies and frameworks the national governments should adopt to facilitate this?

Living with disasters – or developing resilience to disasters – is fast becoming a necessary strategy of day-to-day survival. Communication plays a role in this. In our book, we have an entire chapter on this written by Chin Saik Yoon, who has been researching and documenting participatory communication processes in development. He identifies communication as one of four necessary steps towards recovery from a disaster. Survivors need to maintain communication with family, friends, and counsellors in order to share their experiences. They need to tell their stories about the disaster, and listen to others as they tell theirs. This helps survivors to collectively release their stress.

To continue in his own words: “Participatory communication processes work best here. This is where survivors assume the role of both the ‘initiator’ as well as the ‘receiver’ of communication. No expert or government official should be there to decide what is to be discussed by the survivors. They need only facilitate the process. The participatory processes ensure that communication occurs at the pace that communities are comfortable with and address issues only when survivors are ready to deal with them.”

This makes eminent sense, but it is precisely this kind of thoughtful, sensitive approach that many governments are unable or unwilling to adopt. For too long, governments have been seen as the sole decider, provider and protector – and governments do have a responsibility in all these. But in today’s world, the role of government has to be reviewed and redefined. As Chin says, government officials may facilitate, but governments must get out of the historical habit and temptation of playing Big Mama (or worse, Big Brother!) by doing such communication themselves.

For our quest for disaster resilience to succeed, we need a transformation in governmental policies, attitudes and practices. In a world experiencing a growing number and intensity of multiple hazards, no government – however powerful or well intended – can reach out and protect every citizen. That illusion was shattered forever by hurricane Katrina. There is no need for such governmental omnipresence either! The smart option is to allow, encourage and empower individuals and communities to do part of it on their own. Governments, researchers, aid agencies and charities still have to be part of this – but first they have to break free from the ‘Let’s-Do-It-All-Ourselves’ mentality.

Question: It is evident from the many case studies in the book that participatory non-media modes of communications have been quite useful in dealing with disasters. Such efforts however, need constant involvement of a wider group of people on voluntary basis over a long period of time for creating resilience for disasters. How to develop this spirit and, more important, sustain it.

Yes, participatory communication efforts have to sustain the community engagement over weeks, months and sometimes years. As one of our contributing authors, Buddhi Weerasinghe, has written in the book: “The big challenge is to sustain disaster preparedness interventions over time. This is helped by the creation of informal leadership within the community through participatory action.”

Since no two communities are alike, it’s very hard to generalise on how to develop the necessary conditions and ‘spirit’, but some generic lessons can be drawn from documented examples. The right kind of community leadership helps, as does external help that is neither over-bearing nor fleeting. Assistance from aid agencies needs to be delivered at a pace the communities can absorb, integrate and use.

Disasters are often the latest (and highly disruptive) layer over existing multiple layers in a community. Even if a shared plight and grief temporarily unite a community, that alone cannot hold people together for too long, especially if there are deep divides in that community. So community cohesion and unity become very important factors in the success of participatory communication. There is no single formula that can work for everyone.

Question: The book describes many successful interventions based on non-media participatory mode of communications for disaster management. Which of these interventions do you think can be cited for the most optimal use of non media participatory mode of communications?

In our introduction to the book, Frederick Noronha and I wrote: “Media-based communication is vitally necessary, but not sufficient, in meeting the multiple information needs of disaster risk reduction and disaster management. Other forms of participatory, non-media communications are needed to create communities that are better prepared and more disaster resilient.”

These non-media communication methods range from basic inter-personal communication and small group discussions to participatory rural appraisal techniques. The methods are not new or unique; they are being customised to meet disaster preparedness and/or response needs.

It’s more than mere talk. Some methods involve experiential learning – or learning by doing. An example is participatory hazard mapping. First, community members are divided into a few groups and asked to map their neighbourhoods – they have to capture the roads, footpaths, rivers, hillocks, houses, schools, temples and other key landmarks. Then they mark the areas that have been affected historically with different disasters such as tsunami, floods or cyclones. This helps identify relatively safer areas as well as safety routes in case a new disaster demands quick evacuation. Admittedly this is communication plus social mobilisation, but that’s what it takes in the real world – communication is only part of the solution.

As Buddhi Weerasinghe has written in his chapter, “This exercise allows informal leaderships to emerge. Encouraging this leadership and recognizing their inputs can motivate them and enable sustainability of interventions. The process of hazard mapping also imparts a sense of ownership.”

Question: To what extent is it really practicable to achieve the ‘disaster resilience’ in communities?

Disasters are all about resilience – how we pick ourselves up after a tragedy and slowly return to normalcy. And also how we take repeated battering from a multitude of disasters and still carry on with living. There is no single recipe for success in building disaster resilient communities. Everyone needs to approach this with open and flexible minds, and see what works for whom under which conditions. Disaster resilience is not a slogan like halving poverty by 2015 or writing off majority world’s debt. It’s a long-drawn, incremental process and will always remain a work in progress because both community dynamics and the nature of hazards change over time.

In many cases, the community has information and insights that help achieve resilience, but it needs to be brought out – that’s where participatory communication helps. But let’s not romanticise matters too much – some communities need external guidance, and most can benefit from external facilitation in their quest for resilience.

In a chapter called ‘Bridging the Long Last Mile’, I have described the experience of a community-based disaster preparedness and early warning dissemination effort undertaken by Sarvodaya, LIRNEasia and other partners in Sri Lanka. The project studied which ICTs and community mobilisation methods could work effectively in disseminating information on hazards faced by selected coastal communities all of which were battered by the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004.

Sri Lanka – Last Mile Hazard Info project planning meeting: Photo courtesy Sarvodaya

I would refer you to the chapter for details, but the key lessons may be summed up as follows:
• Trusted technology: Use ICTs that are reliable in performance, accessible at the local levels and trusted by the people.
• Complementary redundancy: Always have at least two different ICTs delivering information, to minimise transmission failures.
• Credible information: Tap only the most authentic sources of information at national and international level, reducing room for misinformation and rumour.
• Right mix: Achieve the appropriate combination of technology, training and institutional arrangements at the grassroots.
• Be prepared: Raise localised awareness and provide experiential training so community know what to do when crisis occurs.

Why do Development Rip Van Winkles prefer ‘Aunties’ without eye-balls?

When I was growing up in suburban Colombo in the 1980s, we had a family friend who worked at the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC). When anyone asked him where he worked, he would simply reply: “I’m in broadcasting.”

That answer was perfectly adequate at the time, when the fully state-owned and government-controlled SLBC was the only domestic broadcaster. The FM radio band was eerily silent, and only die-hard enthusiasts would persist with shortwave crackle to listen to foreign broadcasts like BBC, Voice of America or Radio Veritas from thousands of kilometres away. We also had two state TV channels still learning the ropes.

Today, that kind of answer would mean nothing. Two dozen FM radio channels crowd the airwaves. In the western province, there are 15 free-to-air terrestrial TV channels – and counting.

Most of these are privately owned and commercially operated channels, all started after broadcasting was (partially) liberalised in 1992. They compete fiercely for a share of audience – and advertising revenue. While that can sometimes be a race to the bottom, it’s infinitely better than the bad old days when we had no choice but to tune into ruling party propaganda masquerading as public broadcasting.

The situation is broadly the same in many other countries in the Asia Pacific region. With a few exceptions, the state-owned, government-controlled broadcasters have seen their monopolies end – and as their long-suffering audiences might confirm, not a moment too soon. They now have to compete with younger, more dynamic and decidedly more interesting private channels.

And in every market, former monopolists have seen their audience share shrink, in some cases dramatically. The one-time lords of the airwaves have been reduced to minority players. Many are struggling to make ends meet, and some are kept alive only because governments keep pumping in large volumes of tax-payer funds.

Meanwhile, the eye-balls and advertising revenues have migrated to the privately owned, commercially operated TV stations. They entertain, amuse and sometimes titillate. But they also inform and occasionally educate their audiences.

And yes, many are making money too – and that’s neither illegal nor immoral in market economies.

Alas, the former monopolists haven’t yet stopped crying foul. They allege that the commercial stations are playing by a different set of rules, allowing the latter to play the market and maximise returns. In contrast, the government channels claim to have a ‘public service mandate’ that’s harder to fulfill and not always popular or populist.

Note that I have not used the term ‘public broadcaster’ to describe the government channels – because, whatever their founding documents might say, most of them are not serving the public interest. In developing Asia, which lacks sufficient checks and balances to ensure independence of state broadcasters, the only thing public about such channels is that they are often a drain on public money collected through taxes. Their service and loyalties are entirely to whichever political party, coalition or military dictator in government.

When the divide between governments and the public interest is growing, most ‘public’ channels find themselves on the wrong side. No wonder, then, that discerning views have abandoned them.

Interestingly, old habits and brand loyalty might explain why at least a minority audience still remains for state broadcasters. The state channels have been around for longer, and for years, they were the only show in town. Some of them occupy large swaths of the UHF and VHF spectrum, making their signals easier to catch.

But these advantages would diminish over time. For one thing, young people far outnumber older persons in most parts of developing Asia (almost 62 per cent of the world’s youth – aged between 15 and 24 – are in Asia: that was 716 million in 2005). For another thing, the more dynamic private competition is finding new pathways to reach youthful audiences.

State broadcasters may be venerable to some, but no one thinks of them as ‘cool’. Even the BBC – which is far better shielded from governmental manipulation than its Asian counterparts – has yet to shed its old nickname and image of “Auntie”, originating from its old-fashioned “Auntie knows best” attitude.

In Asia, now home to the world’s largest combined television audience, it’s more a case of grandma knows best. The other day, I asked a young Filipino film-maker and TV journalist about who watches her country’s National Broadcasting Network. “In my family, only grandma watches it,” she replied, adding that the only time others tune in to that channel is to watch lottery results.

This is not an isolated insight. Across Asia, FM radio and commercial TV have captured the markets of the young and young-at-heart.

Nobody grudges grandmas and grandpas being served by their favourite channels. But we have to ask how and why decades of public investments in broadcast infrastructure and institutions are not serving a wider spectrum of the population. Dishing out lottery results and pandering to Narcissistic politicians cannot quite pass as serving the public interest.

Meanwhile, in a welcome trend, the market-leading commercial broadcasters are increasingly turning their massive outreach and influence to serve the public interest. It goes against the conventional wisdom of ivory tower researchers and media activists who cry themselves hoarse accusing commercial broadcasters of reaping profits without returning something to the community. But it’s real.

In market after market, country after country all over the Asia Pacific, privately owned, commercially successful radio and TV channels are championing the public interest. They may not have a UNESCO-articulated grand agenda, but they see it as serving the needs and wants of their loyal audiences.

The services are as diverse as the needs themselves. Some channels are dispensing practical information and advice on all sorts of everyday matters from traffic congestion and vaccination to school admissions and crime prevention. Others have gone further, for example launching national campaigns against narcotic drugs or corruption, and advocating better care for persons living with HIV.

In covering these and other public interest or development issues, commercial channels bring in a healthy dose of creativity, dynamism and innovation. They don’t preach or pontificate. Instead they make it fun, hop and cool to do what we should be doing anyway in our self interest.

See, for example, my Sep 2007 blog post on MTV Exit: Entertainment TV takes on human trafficking

And I don’t mind if some of them laugh all the way to their banks at the end of each financial year. (In reality, many operate on thin margins and few make significant profits.)

A few commercial broadcasters go even further. On a visit to Manila last week, I heard how ABS-CBN – the country’s privately owned, market-leading broadcast group – is doing much for science popularisation and public education. These are done through charitable foundations that deliver public goods through private means.

While all this is happening, the development community seems trapped in a time warp – clinging on to an outdated notion that state broadcasters alone can serve the public interest (if you ask me, they never did). Perhaps out of habit, they keep turning to such channels with their ever-shrinking audiences.

A few weeks ago, a senior official at Sri Lanka’s largest development organisation Sarvodaya told me how hard it was for them to have their development films broadcast. The two state broadcasters had both demanded money for air time.

Strangely, he had not even considered engaging a commercial broadcaster. “After all, we want to be seen our national channels,” he explained.

This Rip Van Winkle attitude doesn’t help anyone, and least of all those communities that development agencies are trying to reach through media-based communication.

As I asked at a recent UNEP-convened meeting in Bangkok: “If in our technical work we are evidence-based, why can’t we be evidence-based in our communication strategies and decisions as well? We must define the priority audiences we want to reach, and find out their media preferences. We need to use independent audience ratings, and not personal perceptions or biases in choosing which stations we work with.”

Thus, if the development community is serious about engaging the broadcast media, they must first awake from their long slumber and quickly update themselves on current realities in Asian broadcasting.

It’s not who owns that decides the public spirited character of a radio or TV station. In today’s complex and nuanced media landscape, it’s the performance and delivery that count.

Aunties without eyeballs can trudge along on government’s crutches. The rest of us have miles to go before we can rest.

Engaging new media: prepare to lose control!

The development community never tires of talking about the value of participatory, two-way communication. Every workshop, report and discussion has a dose of this mantra sprinkled all over.

Yet when it comes to actually practising communication, most development agencies I know are so concerned with complete control – they want to edit endlessly, fine-tune their messages to the last letter and comma, and regulate how and where the message is disseminated.

There’s no harm in being organised and focused. But when communication officers are pushed into becoming publicity agents (or worse, spin doctors!) for their agencies, controlling the message becomes obsessive.

I’ve had more than my fair share of this. One example was when working on a documentary for a leading UN agency in Asia that my organisation, TVE Asia Pacific, was commissioned to produce. Now, films cannot be made by committees, but UN agencies never stop trying. At one point, over-zealous agency officials were tinkering with the post-shooting script so much that they edited even the interview clips included in the draft.

That only stopped when I pointed out that hey, those are transcribed verbatim from interviews we’d already filmed!

So imagine how hard it would be for such organisations to let go of the Complete Control over communications that they’ve aspired to perfect for so long.

And yet, as I told a small meeting convened by UNEP in Bangkok last week to plan their next ozone communication strategy for Asia Pacific, that’s not a choice, but an imperative with today’s new media.

In the four years since we worked on the last ozone communication strategy and action plan for the Asia Pacific, we have seen the emergence of web 2.0 – which is really a catch-all term that covers many second generation, interactive platforms and opportunities that have emerged using the global Internet.

Among these are blogs, wikis, social networking sites (e.g. MySpace, Facebook), social bookmarking (e.g. del.icio.us), video exchange platforms (e.g. YouTube), online games and mobile applications.

These and other new media tools enable development communicators to reach out to, and engage, many people – especially the youth who make up more than half of all Asians.

But that’s part of the challenge, I said, referring to what I call the ‘Other Digital Divide’ – one that separates (most members of) the development community from ‘Digital Natives’, young people who have grown up taking these digital media and tools completely for granted.

I referred to my remarks at the IUCN Asia Conservation Forum in Kathmandu in September 2007, where I stressed the urgent need for the conservation and development communities to cross this divide if they want to reach out to the dominant demographic group in our vast region, home to half of humanity.

Engaging new media is not just setting up a Facebook account, taking a YouTube channel or opening a blog that’s infrequently updated. All that’s useful, for sure, but they represent only the tentative first steps to the wide and varied new media world.

As with the more established print and broadcast media, development organisations need to have a strategy and a plan based on some research, analysis and reflection.

And willing to let go of that control – so cherished by so many development professionals – is an essential part of that adjustment to the new media reality.

Failure to adjust can result in future shocks – and in the very near future! Perhaps I should also have drawn their attention to what I wrote in October 2007: New media tsunami hits global humanitarian sector; rescue operations now on

We didn’t spend too much time talking about new media at the Bangkok meeting, but I did caution that there is a lot of digital hype out there. I’m no expert on this (is anyone, really?) but my team at TVEAP and I keep trying new ways of doing things with the new media. So here are a few quick insights I offered the UNEP meeting:

• New media lot more interactive, which means they demand a lot of time and effort to engage the audience – which in turn generates huge capacity requirements for any development organisation venturing into such media.

• You can’t always control your messages on new media! This unnerves many development agencies and professionals who are so used to exercising such control – in the new media world, they just have to learn to let go!

• A core value is user-generated content (USG). You need to find creative ways to allow your audiences to generate part of the content. Control lost again!

• Citizen journalists have now established themselves online as text and/or video bloggers. Governments and corporations have acknowledged their presence — serious bloggers have recently been granted media accreditation to the UN. What does this mean for future ozone media training and journalists engagement?

• There are many companies and agencies claiming to have cracked the new media challenge – and don’t believe them! Everyone is learning, some admittedly faster than others, but there’s no substitute to actually doing it.

• And there’s no road map to the new media world, which is being created every day and night by an army of geeks and enthusiasts. There are only a few rough guides and travellers’ tales from some like ourselves who have ventured into this realm.

Note: I am grateful to my colleagues at TVE Asia Pacific who have developed and/or tested out some ideas in this blog post: Manori Wijesekera, Indika Wanniarachchi and Nadeeja Mandawala. I stand on their shoulders, hopefully lightly!

Release Ozzy Ozone held prisoner by brand guardians!

In September 2007, I wrote about Ozzy Ozone, an energetic, cheerful little ozone molecule – part of the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere that prevents the Sun’s harmful ultra-violet rays from coming through and causing skin cancer, cataract and other health problems.

Ozzy Ozone is part of a global public education effort by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) to tell everyone how harmful UV rays are to our health, and how Ozzy and his fellow ozone molecules are literally protecting life on earth from being zapped out.

I called Ozzy the little molecule on a big mission — to tell all humans to soon phase out using certain chemicals that, when released to the air, go up and destroy his kind.

Last week, while attending a UNEP meeting in Bangkok to plan the next ozone communication strategy for Asia Pacific, I heard some disturbing news: little Ozzy has become a prisoner of his brand guardians. As a result, he is not as free as he could be to roam the planet, spreading the vital ozone message.

Anne Fenner, Information Officer of UNEP’s OzonAction Programme revealed how she routinely turns down requests to produce toys and other material using the popular character.

“I have had so many requests from companies, but we cannot allow commercial exploitation of this brand,” Anne said.

I was stunned. Here is one of the more popular communication products to emerge from the UN, not generally known for such successful engagement of popular culture. And there we were, brainstorming on ways to get the ozone message to large, scattered (and distracted) audiences.

Ozzy was created by a graphic artist in Barbados, as part of a government-supported campaign to raise public awareness on ozone layer thinning. This cartoon character served as a “mascot” and was very effective in raising awareness in Barbados. The cartoon series was printed in local newspapers. Additionally, promotional items produced for local public awareness and education campaigns using the Ozzy graphic include posters, key rings, rulers, erasers, refrigerator magnets, mouse pads, pens, pencils, stickers, and envelopes.

The character was so popular that UNEP struck a deal with Barbados to ‘globalize’ Ozzy. An animated video was produced, along with a dedicated website, comic strips and other media adaptations.

Ozzy has been a run-away success, giving UNEP a high profile, widely popular character — and a great deal of media coverage and interest. The kind of media engagement that is typically enjoyed by Unicef, the most media-savvy of all UN agencies.

But we now know that Ozzy’s brand guardians don’t allow him to go as far as he could. They may be playing by the rules, but do they realise that huge opportunities are being lost?

There we were, a small group of journalists, communicators, scientists and government officials discussing for three days how to get the biggest bang for our collectively limited buck where ozone messaging is concerned.

It was frustrating to know that the best brand ambassador has been locked up in brand integrity and copyright restrictions.

I suggested to Anne Fenner that protecting the brand integrity need not be so rigidly pursued. For example, careful franchising could be undertaken based on a set of guidelines — and the royalty could go into a trust fund that supports ozone communication work.

Indeed, the challenge for development communicators everywhere is to find the common ground between the public interest and the commercial interest. In this era of globalised media and CSR, the two interests are no longer mutually exclusive. Some might argue they never were.

The long-established copyright regimes themselves are being questioned, challenged and bypassed by a growing number of research, advocacy and activist groups. Many now publish their academic or artistic work under Creative Commons licenses, that enable their creators to be acknowledged and retain some control — and yet allow many types of uses without excessive restriction.

When TVE Asia Pacific recently released an Asian regional book called Communicating Disasters, our co-publisher UNDP Regional Centre in Bangkok proposed that the book be under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. We were happy to go along.

UNEP has some catching up to do. Turning the pages of lavishly illustrated Ozzy Ozone comic story books (of which 3 titles have come out so far), I found that UNEP has the standard copyright restriction. However, they add a line: “This publication may be reproduced in whole or part and in any form for educational or non-profit purposes without special permission from the copyright holder, provided acknowledgement of the source is made.”

That’s encouraging – but not good enough. What happens if a commercially operated media organisation wants to use this content for public interest? Will they qualify under ‘educational or non-profit purposes’?

Probably not. And that’s when the dreaded copyright lawyers could come marching out.

It’s the assorted lawyers and over-cautious officials who are keeping Ozzy Ozone a virtual prisoner.

And sadly, little Ozzy is not alone. Everywhere in the publishing and media world, we can find many examples of how creative works are being held back – usually by over-protective lawyers or accountants. Sometimes that’s the case even if the artistes or media professionals themselves would much rather let go of the rights.

In July 2007, I wrote a blog post called ‘The lawyers who locked up the butterfly tree’ — which revealed how lawyers working for the publicly-funded BBC had systematically blocked a multi-award winning African documentary film from being used for environmental education, awareness and advocacy. All because the BBC had partly funded its production, and therefore had a claim on its copyright.

So here’s our plea to Ozzy’s brand guardians in UNEP: let him roam free, taking the vital message to millions. And while at it, let him make some money (from franchisees) which can suppot the rest of UNEP’s ozone communication work.

And if some spoilsport of a copyright lawyer gets in the way, tell him/her to take a beach vacation — without sunblock.

Race to Save the Sky…by 2010

This is the opening segment of an Asian film that we at TVE Asia Pacific produced in 2006 for the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

Called Return of the Ozone Layer: Are We There Yet? (30 mins, 2006), it tells the story of how the Asia Pacific – home to half of humanity – holds the key to saving the ozone layer…from man-made chemicals eating it up.

We presented it as a race…against time, and against many odds. Here’s how it opens.

You wouldn’t notice it even if you look carefully…but the Asia Pacific is running an important race.

It’s a race to phase out a group of chemicals used in industry, agriculture or consumer products.

When released to the atmosphere, these chemicals damage the Earth’s protective ozone layer. This ‘ozone shield’ protects all life from the Sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays.

These chemicals are used in refrigerators, air conditioners, fire fighting equipment, farming and a range of other products and processes.

The industrialised countries have already stopped producing these chemicals. This happened thanks to an international environmental treaty called the ‘Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer’. It was adopted in 1987 in response to the thinning of the ozone layer – or the ‘Ozone Hole’ –discovered two years earlier.

The Montreal Protocol sets time-bound, measurable targets for managing nearly 100 different chemicals.

These are closely tied to economic activity, public health and safety. Therefore, developing countries and economies in transition were given more time to reduce consumption — with the same goal of eventually phasing them out.

20 years on, the Montreal Protocol’s implementation has produced tremendous benefits to our health and environment.

But it’s a bit too early to celebrate.

Many challenges remain.

Developing countries now have to show they are making good use of the extra time and resources given to them.

It is the Asia Pacific that now produces and consumes most of the world’s Ozone Depleting Substances – or ODS. .

All production and use of CFCs in developing countries must stop in 2010.

But it’s easier said than done. The region has tens of thousands of small scale industries and farms that still use ozone damaging chemicals.

To accomplish the remaining phase-out targets, all
of them need to be engaged.

In this film, we look at key challenges the Asia Pacific region faces on the road to 2010. Meeting these challenges would ensure timely compliance of phase-out targets.

Clearly, governments alone cannot win this race. Millions of ordinary citizens have to join in.

Millions like the five we feature in this film.

Making this 30-minute documentary was a challenge. For a start, we had to grapple with complex scientific, economic and political issues and present them in a non-technical, accessible manner. We knew the average viewer was not interested in the intricacies of inter-governmental negotiations or atmospheric chemical reactions.

Talking about the ozone layer – which is out of sight, lying a few kilometers above the Earth’s surface – is never easy. It’s harder to get people to pay attention that sustained action is needed to remove man-made threats to the ozone layer.

Our challenge was to tell the story in a simple, engaging way — and UNEP wanted it to be different from many ozone layer documentaries already made. That’s when we decided to focus on five ordinary Asians who were doing their bit to save the ozone layer.