Communicating development – Page 40

Rule of the Gun in Sugarland: A film by Joey R B Lozano

In June 2007, I did a belated tribute to Joey R B Lozano, a courageous Filipino journalist who crusaded for human rights and social justice. Armed with his video camera and laptop, he was one of the early citizen journalists long before that term – and practice – became fashionable.

As I wrote:
Joey used his personal video camera to assert indigenous land rights, and to investigate corruption and environmental degradation in his native Philippines. Joey was an independent human rights activist and also one of the country’s leading investigative reporters.

He freelanced for the Philippine Daily Inquirer, covering Indigenous peoples’ rights and the environment, considered the two most dangerous beats in the Philippines. But years earlier, he had moved out of the capital Manila, and committed his life and career to stories and issues at the grassroots that many of his city-based colleagues had no time or patience in covering on an on-going basis.

Trained as a print journalist, Joey mastered new media and technologies whose potential he quickly realised. He moved into television and video media with ease, and later became an active blogger.

I have just tracked down on YouTube one of his documentaries, Rule of the Gun in Sugarland (2001; 9 minutes; English). It’s a powerful documentary that tells the story of Manobo villagers’ efforts to claim their ancestral land in the Philippines, and the abuse they endured because of their claim. It contains both graphic and heart wrenching scenes.

Here’s some background on indigenous people’s rights in the Philippines, as compiled by Witness – the human rights activist group with which Joey worked closely.

Source: Witness nomination of Joey R B Lozano as a Hero on Universalrights.net

The history of the Philippines is a history of colonization, resettlement and battles over who will rule the land.

First the Spanish, then the Americans, then the Japanese, and now multinational corporations have at one time or another dominated the Filipino landscape. Each wave of colonization has forced people off more land, creating a domino effect across the 7,000 islands. Resettlement in turn, has created even more pressure on successive islands as settlers move in, pushing even more people out.

Today, despite continued widespread poverty across the Philippines, Indigenous tribe members remain the most marginalized sector of Philippine society.

In a country of 76.5 million people, almost 20 per cent are Indigenous peoples. They belong to at least 32 different ethnolinguistic groups. More than half are on Mindanao, the largest southern island.

Over the last century, Indigenous peoples have lost their traditional lands, as the logging industry, ranchers and large plantations have forcibly taken over lands, piece by piece.

Much like in other parts of the world, the land was won parcel by parcel. Original verbal agreements were made and often respected between individual ranchers and Tribe leaders to “borrow” land from the Tribe. But the agreements were quickly forgotten when the rancher died. Over the years, the land was then resold without the Tribes’ consent.

And then, under the Marcos regime, Indigenous people suffered along with farmers, as massive tracts of land were appropriated for the dictator and his cronies. When Marcos was finally thrown out by a people’s revolt, and flown out on a U.S. helicopter, successive democratic governments introduced multiple land reforms intended to redistribute the land justly, but none of these reforms ever really worked.

On the ground level, corruption and misuse of power prevented the land from being rationed and made accessible to the people the reforms were intended to help.

Meanwhile, the land reforms were intended to help the peasants and the fact that many of the lands in question were Indigenous Ancestral domains was never addressed.

Mindanao is rich in natural resources – some of the world’s last ancient rainforests, fertile soils, underground treasures of gold, an abundancy of fish — all now under the threat of overdevelopment.

In 1997, the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act was signed into law. The law is explicit on the Indigenous peoples’ right to ancestral lands. But this has not become operational to date. This fact is exacerbated by the present government’s industrialization thrust and commitment to globalization. Tribal lands, thus, are being continually opened for extractive business.

For more information, check Seeing is Believing website

Hard Times: Give us more cars and less traffic!

In July 2007, we featured an interesting new film called Faecal Attraction. It probed the link between sewage disposal and river water pollution in India — specifically, the River Yamuna, part of the massive Indo-Gangetic river system.

Now the intrepid film-maker Pradip Saha has taken on another big, messy subject that has even bigger vested interests: the auto industry and its contribution to worsening traffic congestion, air pollution and public health in metropolitan India, especially the capital Delhi.

The film couldn’t have come at a better (worse?) time. India’s Tata Motors will be unveiling their people’s car, priced at Indian Rupees 100,000 (US$ 2,600 approx) on 10 January 2008 at Auto Expo in New Delhi.

“A car priced at hundred thousand Indian Rupees means a lot in terms of urban planning, urban life,” says Pradip, who is also the editor of Down to Earth magazine on science and environment. “Roads are already clogged, winter air is thick with SOX and NOX, our cities will be swarming with small cars.”

He says a few gunfights have already taken place in Delhi between neighbours over claims on parking space. Automobile industry has made urban space pretty absurd.

Pradip Saha Courtesy CSE India
Courtesy CSE Down to Earth

Yet, he adds, any opposition to the introduction of these swarming small cars on account of increasing traffic congestion and pollution has been termed by the car maker and their friends as ‘elitist’. “This car maker has positioned itself as the agent of liberation, where we all have cars. Kink has no boundary.”

So Pradip decided to take the issue head on, making fun of a very serious situation.

Here’s the story behind the film, in Pradip Saha’s own words:

I was invited for an art residency by Khoj, an international artist’s association in Delhi. The brief was to create a public artwork with urban ecological concern.

I decided to do something on automobiles. My initial response was to respond to the way automobiles are sold, playing with desire. I also find certain policy issues related to automobile use pretty kinky. For example, when the auto bosses complain to highest financial authority about slump in auto sale, the highest financial authority calls the bank bosses to make car loans easy. Isn’t it kinky? I was thinking of pushing these kinks and business of desire a bit and create pornography that has automobiles as characters.

I made two. But wasn’t sure about putting them in public as kids will be seeing them too. I have been talking a few friends to create a website of automobile porns, mimicking standard porn site sensibilities.

So I turned to another format. I created a fake news TV channel called HARD TIMES, and went to the road interviewing drivers and riders in cars stuck in traffic jam in Delhi. The style is a take on News TV style, where they stick a microphone down your throat on any occasion, pretending a democratic format that generates peoples’ voice.

I did the same, with 2 basic questions: What is the reason of traffic jam? and How can we solve traffic jam? I edited 5.50 minutes video, and showed it as a loop in Connaught place, on the pavement on a large plasma screen. It also had an accompanying LED display board, a la, railway station information system, that went on giving out important numbers related to absurdity of automobile use in the city. This was a loop too.

Ultra low-cost small cars — such as the much-hyped models being planned by the Tatas and other carmakers — can mean big trouble for India, unless the country makes drastic policy changes. A new study by Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) , released in October 2007, said the influx of these cars would drive public transport and two-wheelers off the roads and greatly increase urban congestion and pollution.

Courtesy CSE Down to Earth

Read CSE’s Down to Earth cover story on 15 October 2007: Small car revolution: Who cares about congestion, pollution

Little voices from the waves: Maldives too young to die!

My post last week on the Maldives on the frontline of climate change reminds me that I have been covering this story for the better part of 20 years. I have just located this photo from the depths of my personal image collection.

I first visited the Maldives in 1988, which was within months of the Indian Ocean archipelago nation suffering from a massive storm surge in 1987. Although the damage was minimal, the experience was a forceful reminder of how vulnerable the Maldives can be to even a small rise in sea levels – this is what prompted the low lying nation to take up the issue internationally.

In November 1989, the Maldives hosted the first ever small states conference on sea level rise, held at the Kurumba island resort.

It was also one of the earliest international gatherings on this issue, which was to gain public interest and momentum in the years that followed. Among the participants were delegates from practically all the small states in different parts of the world (defined as those with less than 1 million population), and scientists from disciplines such as oceanography, climatology, meteorology and geology.

This was one of the first international scientific events that I covered as an eager young science journalist. I was then a roving South Asian correspondent for Asia Technology, a popular monthly on Asian science and technology published from Hong Kong (which, alas, folded up in 1991) – there’s nothing online as it was in the pre-web era!

The conference had technical sessions where experts debated scenarios and implications, and a political segment where delegations made their official statements. In the end, they issued the Malé Declaration on Global Warming and Sea Level Rise, which urged for inter-governmental action on the issue.

Some 18 years later, I’m still eager but not so young – and I’ve covered more than my share of international environmental conferences to know that they can’t save the world. At least not on their own.

But many serve a useful function in rallying around concerned parties, helping them to agree on advocacy positions. Progress at inter-governmental level can be painfully slow and incremental. Sustaining public and media interest is one way to keep pressure on the endlessly bickering governments.

Following the November 1989 conference, small island states played a key role in negotiations that led to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change adopted in 1992. This is the precursor to Kyoto, Bali and other processes that are now very much in the news.

The Maldivian hosts knew that scientists and officials alone could not send out a powerful message to the world on what climate change means to low lying islands of the world – many of them no more than a few feet above sea level.

So on the last day evening, we were all taken to the Maldivian capital of Male, where we saw a demonstration and meeting held by the school children and ordinary people. To me, at least, this was the most striking moment of the whole week.

Leading up to this, I had been listening to competent experts and concerned officials talk about impacts, scenarios and mitigation measures for several days. Based on my notes and interviews, I filed several stories that captured highlights.

But unless I go back to my personal archives and look up those stories, I can no longer remember what I wrote. My lingering memories of this event are in these images, showing school children telling delegates – and the world – what it means to be living on the front lines of climate change impact.

Then newly formed Maldivian environmental organisation Bluepeace was also part of the demonstration:

I worked for several years as a science and technology reporter. I was trained to gather, process and present facts and, preferably, expert opinion. But over the years I have realised that while hard facts and expert opinions are necessary, these tell only one part of complex stories we cover.

We need to bring in the human face of our stories — how ordinary children, women and men feel about issues and how they react to situations. This is why I now argue that we should not allow the human face of climate change to be lost in our well-meaning technical and economic discussions about climate change mitigation and adaptation.

We can cover carbon neutrality, zero emissions and common but differentiated responsibilities for all we like, but if we don’t pause to listen to these little voices from the waves – from the frontlines that are already feeling the heat – we will miss the bigger picture of what climate change is all about.

Dec 2007: Road to Bali – Beware of ‘Bad Weather Friends’

Photos by Nalaka Gunawardene, Male island, November 1989

Return to Paradise: Maldives on the frontline of climate change

All of us at TVE Asia Pacific are missing Mariyam Niuma.

This bubbly, happy-go-lucky intern returns to her native Maldives this week after working with us for over a year as a programme assistant. She plans to spend more time with her family, and explore work opportunities in the Indian Ocean archipelago nation of 370,000 people.

Niuma, in her early 20s, applied for a staff position in late 2006. Among other things, she came with skill and dexterity in graphic design, web research and English proficiency — always useful for a regional communication organisation like ourselves.

“I want to learn as much as I can how a non-profit organisation works,” she told as at the recruitment interview. She had plans of taking the knowledge and skills back to her home atoll, hoping to make life better for her people.

I hope she found what she was looking for. We found in her an energetic young person with good attitude – one who could be challenged to work on tough (and sometimes tedious) tasks on a regular basis.

“The last year has been a very challenging and fulfilling year for me, and being at TVEAP helped a lot,” she wrote in an email on her last day at work. “I will miss you all and being a part of you and will always remember the good times and everything I have learnt here both professionally and personally.”

Some months into her internship, Niuma gave us a presentation on her home country, home atoll and life at home. To many outsiders, Maldives evokes images of palm-fringed sandy beaches, shallow seas of an exquisitely azure blue, high end resorts, crystal clear blue waters for diving…and plenty of sunshine all the year round. (Image shows Kurumba resort, Maldives.)

Well, all that’s true as widely advertised. But Maldives is a whole lot more – a history going back to at least 1,500 BC, distinctive island culture, and a nation that is struggling to reconcile tradition with modernity. Divehi, the Maldivian language, contributed the word “atoll” (a ring-shaped coral reef) to the English language.

The former British protectorate, which became independent in 1965 and a republic in 1968, has a pro-democracy movement sustained over the past few years. If such political turbulences create a sense of uncertainty in the minds of Maldivians about their future, it’s only one source of concern.

They also have to worry about whether their nation would have a collective future. That’s because of climate change that scientists now confirm are underway, aggravated by human action.

Most of the 1,200 islands in the Maldives are no more than 1m (3 feet) above sea level. Even a modest rise in sea levels could inundate these lands. Within 100 years the Maldives could become uninhabitable.

Time is indeed running out for Niuma and her country — as this poster produced by The Body Shop reminds us.

time-is-running-out — Time is running out...and not just for the Maldives

In 1987 and 1991 storm surges flooded a large number of islands, including one-third of the capital where one-quarter of the country’s population lives. Unusually high waves forced the international airport to be closed, causing great damage to tourism and constraining emergency relief operations. On 26 December 2004, the Asian tsunami battered the Maldives, forcing the evacuation of 13 of its 200 inhabited islands. These incidents indicate how vulnerable the islands are to wave action.

Maldives was among the first countries in the world to raise climate change as a serious issue at the United Nations. President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom raised the alarm back in 1987, when most people had not even realised the problem and scientific evidence was just beginning to come in.

The Maldives did more than raise the issue. The country played a lead role in rallying around other small island states worldwide that would be among the first to be impacted when sea levels rise due to thermal expansion and melting of polar ice.

In November 1989, the Maldives hosted the first ever small states conference on sea level rise, which was one of the first international scientific events that I covered as an eager young science journalist.

The conference issued the Malé Declaration on Global Warming and Sea Level Rise, which urged for inter-governmental action on the issue. The small island states played a key role in negotiations that led to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change adopted in 1992. This is the precursor to Kyoto, Bali and other processes that are now very much in the news.

Just a few weeks ago, in mid November 2007, the Maldives once again hosted representatives from small island states to discuss climate change. Eighteen years after the original meeting, the subject is no longer a fringe concern; it’s now on everybody’s agenda.

maldives-islands — Maldives from the air: tiny specs in the ocean

The meeting urged the the human dimension of global climate change to be included in the agenda of UN Climate Change Summit in Bali (December 2007), and sought the international community’s commitment “to protect people, planet and prosperity by taking urgent action to stabilize the global climate change”.

This time, the Male’ Declaration on the Human Dimension of Global Climate Change called for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to assess the human rights implications of climate change and “to conduct a study into the effects of climate change on the full enjoyment of human rights”. It requested the UN Human Rights Council to convene in March 2009 a debate on human rights and climate change.

I wasn’t at the November 2007 Male meeting, but was glad that the meeting stressed the need for adding a human face to the complex, nuanced challenge of climate change. This resonates very much with my own experience.

Read my April 2007 blog post: Wanted – human face of climate change

Mariyam Niuma takes me a bit closer to the realities of what climate change means to communities living on the frontline. Unlike Niuma, who is web savvy and connected with the wider world, many are blissfully unaware of the problem.

Our challenge is to bring their voices, stories and aspirations to the global news agenda and the myriad discussions now underway searching for solutions.

I hope someday we can work with Niuma again — perhaps amplifying her story in moving images.

Nov 2007 blog post: True people power needed to fight climate change

Related blog post: 6 Jan 2008: Little voices from the waves: Maldives too young to die

Photos of Mariyam Niuma courtesy Manori Wijesekera of TVEAP

Covering disasters in the globalised media: Beyond what happened…

“In a global information society where there is a constant race for who delivers the news first, such news undoubtedly fill a need — the need to know. But does reporting on disaster, conflict, international politics or other issues, throw up other questions beyond ‘what happened’? Questions like: What does this mean? How did this happen? How do other communities cope? Are the funds being put to good use? Is the kind of assistance coming in sensitive to different communities’ needs? Which communities are left out from receiving aid and why?

“These are some of the questions that beg to be delved into, and are the niche for media organisations, whose mission it is to try to look at the bigger picture and put the issues behind the events in context. This is not to say that some are always better than others. It is a way of stressing that ‘media’ are far from a homogenous crowd, and that different media organizations have different media products, stemming from different assessments of their audiences and mission.”

This is an extract from the chapter titled “The 2004 Tsunami: Unfinished Story”, by journalist Johanna Son for Communicating Disasters: An Asia Pacific Resource Book (co-edited by Nalaka Gunawardene and Frederick Noronha, and released in December 2007).

Johanna (photographed below addressing TVE Asia Pacific staff in August 2007), a journalist for two decades, is director of Inter Press Service (IPS) Asia-Pacific, the regional foundation that is part of the IPS international news agency. A Philippine national, Son was previously correspondent and editor for IPS Asia-Pacific, as well as staffer of the Manila Chronicle.

How many ways are there to report on a disaster? Johanna uses examples from IPS to ‘do a post-mortem of sorts in the spirit of sharing the challenges of covering disasters like that of the tsunami and of learning from one another.’

Here are some more extracts – the full chapter will be placed online in January 2008:

“On 26 December 2004, I was in Manila, the Philippines, for the year-end holidays when the newsbar across the screens of international TV networks began flashing reports that “scores” were believed to have been killed by a tsunami in the Indian Ocean. It was, we were told, triggered by an undersea earthquake recorded at up to 9.3 magnitude on the Richter Scale. (This has since been called the second most powerful earthquake ever recorded by a seismograph.)

“In the following hours, the number kept rising – first to “hundreds” then to “thousands”. Even without much detail and description, it was clear this was quite a different disaster. News desks around the world went into action.

“The editor for my region was on holidays in Africa. So I was in touch with our regional correspondent, who was then on holidays in Sri Lanka, and also in contact with a regular contributor from Colombo, as well our correspondent in India. We agreed on a few story angles, trying to focus not on what had already been reported and added little to the avalanche of stories out there, but on how, for instance, the effects of the tsunami interplayed with the ethnic tensions in Sri Lanka.

“A look back at the coverage on the IPS wire — ipsnews.net — at that time shows two different kinds of stories in the days and weeks after December 26. Some were more obvious, predictable ones, and other more contextual ones that, regardless of where they were filed from, hew more closely to the news agency’s mission of trying to provide reporting that explains – and not only records what is happening.”

Photo courtesy TVE Asia Pacific

After the Tsunami: Going the Long Last Mile in Sri Lanka

This is J A Malani. She’s an ordinary Sri Lankan woman living in Hambantota, on the island’s southern coast. Several hundred people in her town perished when the Indian Ocean Tsunami arrived on 26 December 2004 without any public warning. When the waves finally stopped their hammering, close to 40,000 people were dead or missing in the biggest disaster the island nation experienced.

Survivor Malani and her neighbours – lucky to be alive – are naturally apprehensive about when the next disaster might arrive, in what form and from where.

And this time around, too, they worry whether there would be anyone to warn them about it.

There just might be. Since the big tsunami three years ago, several Sri Lankan telecom operators, civil society organisations, IT companies and researchers have come together to test out a community-based hazard warning system — one that would prevent the repetition of the nasty surprise Malani’s community experienced not too long ago.

‘Evaluating Last Mile Hazard Information Dissemination Project’ (HazInfo project for short) was an action research project by LIRNEasia to find out how communication technology and training can be used to safeguard grassroots communities from disasters. It involved Sarvodaya, Sri Lanka’s largest development organisation, and several other partners, and was supported by International Development Research Center (IDRC) of Canada.

The project studied which information and communications technologies (ICTs) and community mobilisation methods could work effectively in disseminating information on hazards faced by coastal communities. The exercise was not confined to tsunamis alone; other rapid onset disasters such as cyclones and floods were also covered.

In its first phase, the project worked in 32 chosen coastal villages (all impacted by the tsunami) and mobilised local communities from muslim, Sinhala and Tamil backgrounds. Malini’s community was among those participating in this field testing of an approach that Sarvodaya hopes to roll out progressively to all 15,000 villages they work in.

That initial engagement by itself was reassuring to Malani. “This has helped us to get rid of fear and hesitation in our minds,” she said in a television interview recorded some weeks ago. “Now we know what we should do when a disaster strikes.”

That peace of mind is priceless to any human being, and that knowledge is liberating – particularly to one who has survived a major disaster that came from nowhere.

Malani is one of several beneficiaries featured in a 12-minute film TVE Asia Pacific recently produced. Several other participants from different coastal locations expressed similar views — and hopes that next time around, they will not be taken unawares.

The Long Last Mile can be viewed on YouTube in two parts:

The Long Last Mile, part 1 of 2:

The Long Last Mile, part 2 of 2:

LIRNEasia researchers analysed how each ICT tool or combination was integrated into communities to deliver timely warnings to those designated as first responders. The factors needed for efficient functioning of the hazard information hub were also studied. Read detailed findings and analysis here.

The HazInfo project grew out of a participatory concept paper that LIRNEasia developed in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami. It noted that a national early warning system was a ‘pure public good’, and the responsibility of its supply would normally fall on the government. However, the paper acknowledged that, due to lack of capacity, “it is unlikely that the last mile of such a system will be provided by the local government or private firms operating in the marketplace”.

I have written a whole chapter on this project, titled Bridging the Long Last Mile, in Communicating Disasters: An Asia Pacific Resource Book (co-edited by Nalaka Gunawardene and Frederick Noronha). Read that chapter here:

bridging-the-long-last-mile-final-text-formated.pdf

Impressions of GK3: All geek but very little meek…and at what high cost?

I spent a good part of my last week (9 – 13 December 2007, both days inclusive) in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur participating in the Third Global Knowledge Conference or GK3.

GK3 was organised by a network called the Global Knowledge Partnership, as a platform for those interested in using information and communications technologies (ICTs) for the greater good – to solve real world problems of poverty, under-development, illiteracy and various other disparities that afflict our world.

Those within the GKP call it ICT for Development, abbreviated as ICT4D. I prefer the more catchy phrase ‘Geek2Meek’ (or using geeks’ tools/toys to serve the needs of the meek).

In the spirit of spawning endless acronyms and abbreviations that contribute to the Alphabet Soup, I will compress this as G2M.

GK3 was meant to showcase the best of G2M products, practices and processes in every area of human endeavour — education, health, natural resource management, poverty reduction, empowering youth and women, promoting enterprise, etc.

After spending a good deal of my time and energy sampling many of GK3’s offerings, my cumulative impression was: there was a lot of geek for sure, but very little of the meek.

And the nexus between geek (tools) and meek (needs) was hopelessly lost in the incredible volume of hype, PR and spin generated by the platform organisers. What a missed opportunity it was for everyone!

To be fair, GK3 was not a single conference, but a whole platform of events sharing the large physical space of the KL Convention Centre and spread through the week of 9 to 13 December 2007. During that time and using that space, various groups organised diverse events and activities — ranging from the usual talk sessions and workshops to training, exhibitions, quiz shows, a TV debate and a documentary film festival. There were also several social events that provided many hours networking among individuals and organisations.

Event platforms like GK3 mean very different things to different people. Some turn up mainly to show and tell (or share) what they are doing. Some attend simply to find out what’s going on. Others look for markets, partners or opportunities. With some planning and work, most participants get to take away something in the end.

All this certainly happened during GK3 to one extent or another. It brought together hundreds of people from all over the world who share an interest in G2M — according to official figures, a total of 1,766 registered participants from 135 countries, comprising 19% from public sector, 21% from private sector, 29% from civil society, 20% from international organisations, 5% from media and 6% from academia. Among them, 82% of participants were from developing countries. And half of all participants were from Asia, which was not surprising given their easier access to KL.

These participants — most of them eager, energetic and creative individuals — talked and mixed in a myriad combinations around the overall platform theme: how the threads of emerging people, markets and technologies will intertwine to deliver the future. There was discussion, debate, sharing and networking.

I myself did all of this. I attended part of the 3rd World Electronic Media Forum, joined the GKP’s 10th birthday celebration, sat through some plenary and parallel sessions and moderated two sessions myself. Some TVE Asia Pacific documentary films that I had scripted or directed were screened at the i4d film festival, a key side event. The week also saw the release of two Asian regional books that I was involved in creating (one I co-edited, and the other I wrote a chapter for).

But being the professional skeptic that I am, I don’t buy the GK3 secretariat’s post-event claim that “An overwhelming number of participants indicated that GK3 is the only event of its kind, is absolutely critical and worthwhile.” I have no doubt that a statistically higher number of people made nice and kind remarks about the week’s offerings, as many such people are wont to, especially if their participation was supported by travel scholarships. (I would be interested to know how many of the 1,700 people came on their own steam, as I did.)

In fact, style (and hype) over substance characterised the entire GK3 platform — the hype had actually started months before the event, with all registered participants being bombarded by endless promotional emails that I found simply intolerable. (And no, the organisers didn’t offer us the option of unsubscribing.) So much time, energy and donor funds were spent – nay, squandered – on dressing it up and inflating everything to the point of losing all credibility. If anyone was laughing all the way to their banks after GK3, it must be the assorted spin doctors!

As I have written and spoken (for example in an op ed article in i4d magazine, June 2006), the gulf between the (expensive) hype and reality in ICT circles can be wide and shocking. What is worth investigating is the development effectiveness of this whole platform, and the value for money it delivered.

Take, for example, an email circular sent out by the GK3 organisers days after the platform ended. Under ‘key initial findings’, they list the following for emerging technologies, the area that interests me the most (verbatim reproduction here):

Four future-oriented outlook involving technologies were highlighted – media, cybersecurity, low cost devices, and green technologies.
* Increased convergence of different media allows single broadcasting (one to many) to be complemented by social broadcasting (many to many), and in turn increases interactivity in the exchange of information.
* Cybersecurity, cybercrimes and cyberwaste are becoming real dangers which deserve special attention.
* More new low cost devices are needed to facilitate affordable access to information, knowledge, communication and new forms of learning.
* Demand for innovative green technologies is welcomed and growing.

I don’t see how any of this can be labelled as ‘findings’ — these are not even articulate expressions of already known trends, conditions or challenges. Is this how the ‘Event of the Future’ going to be recorded for posterity? Surely, GK3 achieved more than this – probably below the radar of its spin doctors?

GK3 to me was more evidence of the disturbing and very unhealthy rise of spin in international development circles, where both development organisations and development donors are increasingly investing in propagandistic, narcissistic communications products and processes. While publicity in small doses does little harm, it is definitely toxic in the large volume doses that are being peddled whether in relation to MDGs or humanitarian assistance or, as with GK3, in relation to Geek2Meek. Full-page, full-colour paid advertisements in the International Herald Tribune don’t come cheap — but they come at the expense of the poor and marginalised.

I was also struck by how web 1.0 the GK3 organising effort was — all official statements, images and communication products (and even social events) were so carefully crafted, orchestrated, controlled. Whatever spontaneous action came not from the Big Brotherly organisers but from some free-spirited participants who seized the opportunity to express or experiment. The defining characteristics of web 2.0 – of being somewhat anarchic, highly participatory and interactive – were not the hallmarks of GK3. Again, a missed opportunity.

Then there was the ridiculously named Moooooooooooooo – sorry, it was actually MoO, an abbreviation for ‘Marketplace of Opportunities’, which GK3 was supposed to create or inspire for all those engaged in Geek2Meek work.

The MoO turned out to be just another exhibition where two or three dozen organisations put up their ware to show and tell (and a few did brag and sing, but that’s allowed at places like this). Strangely for an ICT gathering, there was so much paper floating around — posters, leaflets, booklets, books, postcards, you name it! And very few CDs, DVDs and electronic formats being distributed.

Oct 2007 Blog post: Say Moooooooooo – Mixing grassroots and iCT in KL

In the last hour of the final day, I walked around the MoO (I must admit I was half curious to see if the cows have come home!). I was stunned by the massive volumes of mixed up paper lying around everywhere. The week’s events were drawing to an end, and it was unlikely there would be too many more takers for all this paper. My colleague Manori captured on her mobile phone this image of an exasperated me surrounded by mountains of paper.

The MoO exhibitors were not alone in their profligacy and wastefulness – the GK3 secretariat easily wins the prize for producing the greatest volume of glossy, expensive paper-based promotional material for at least a year preceding the event. These were often sent in multiple copies to heaven knows how many thousands of people all over the planet.

All this happened in a year (2007) when scientific confirmation of global climate change prompted governments, industry and civil society to realise that business as usual cannot continue, and more thrifty ways to consume energy and resources must be adopted. Ironically, GK3 was largely ignored by the world’s news media who focused much more attention on the UN Climate Change conference underway in neighbouring Indonesia’s Bali island.

I have commented separately on the missing link between KL and Bali. It is highly questionable what value-for-money benefit an ICT event like GK3 could derive from the abundance of paper-based materials produced to promote it. It’s revealing that the GKP’s oft-repeated claims of attracting 2,000 participants to GK3 were under-achieved despite excessive promotion.

Writing in October 2007, I said: “An informed little bird saysGK3 has milked development donors well and truly for this 3-day extravaganza. I hope someone will calculate the cost of development aid dollars per ‘Mooo’…”

Well, now is the time to ask those difficult questions. The donor agencies of several developed countries — and from Canada and Switzerland in particular — invested heavily in the GK3 extravaganza. These are public funds collected through taxes, given in trust to these agencies for rational and prudent spending. And it’s fair to say that most of this official development assistance (ODA) money is given with the noble aim of reducing poverty, suffering and socio-economic disparities in the majority world.

The GK3 organisers — that is, the GKP Secretariat — often talk in lofty terms about good governance, extolling the virtues of accountability and transparency. Here’s your chance to practise what you preach to the governments and corporations of the world: disclose publicly how much in total was collected for GK3 (from development donors, corporate sponsors, hefty registration fees), and how this money was spent. In sufficient detail, please!

We will then decide for ourselves whether GK3 provided value for money in the truest sense of that concept, and assess if GK3 was ‘absolutely critical and worthwhile’ as the organisers so eagerly claim.

It’s easy for like-minded people to become buddies and get cosy in international development networks. It’s also common to engage in self congratulatory talk and mutual back-slapping at and after gatherings like GK3. But too much manufactured (spun?) consensus and applause can blind our collective vision and lead us astray.

If we genuinely want to engage in Geek2Meek (or, ICT4D), we have to keep repeating the vital questions: what is the value addition that ICTs bring to the development process, and what is the value addition that mega-events like GK3 provide for turning geek tools to serve the meek? Answers must be honest, evidence-based and open to discussion (and dissension, if need be).

In not sharing the euphoria of GK3 organisers, I probably sound like that little boy who dared to point out that the mighty emperor had no clothes. If nobody talks these inconvenient truths and asks some uncomfortable questions, we would be going round and round in our cosy little grooves till the cows come home.

Did someone say Mooooooooooooo?

Read my November 2005 op ed essay written just after WSIS II: Waiting for pilots to land in Tunis

From KL to Bali: Why were ICT and climate change debates worlds apart?

Communicating Disasters in digitally empowered Asia: A tale of two books

I have just spent a hectic week in Kuala Lumpur, and am just coming up for fresh air. That explains why this blog was silent for a few days.

I was at the Third Global Knowledge Conference (GK3) held in the Malaysian capital from 11 to 13 December 2007. With several related events preceding the main conference, my week was completely full.

GK3 was a global platform for all those engaged in using ICTs (information and communication technologies) for meeting the real world’s needs and solving its problems — to reduce poverty, increase incomes, create safer communities, create sustainable societies and support youth enterprise, etc. (Read my impressions of GK3 in this blog post.)

The week’s assorted events saw two separate video films produced by TVE Asia Pacific being screened as integral components of two sessions. These were The Long Last Mile (on community-based warning of rapid onset disasters) and Teleuse@BOP (on telephone use patterns among low income groups in five emerging Asian economies).

That wasn’t surprising because we produce and distribute films that capture Asia’s quest for improving lives through sustainable development. But unusually for myself, I also had two books coming out during the week — one that I had edited, and another that carried a chapter I had written.

The first was Communicating Disasters: An Asia Pacific Resource Book, which I co-edited with Indian journalist Frederick Noronha. It was the culmination of a year-long process that began with an Asian brainstorming meeting on Communicating Disasters that TVEAP convened in December 2006 in Bangkok. That meeting, attended by three dozen participants drawn from media and disaster management sectors, identified the need for a handbook that can strengthen cooperation of these two communities before, during and after disasters.

The book, comprising 19 chapters contributed by 21 authors, has a foreword written by Sir Arthur C Clarke, inventor of the communication satellite. Pulling together these contributions from the specialist authored scattered across the globe was no easy task for co-editor Fred and myself.

The book’s blurb reads as follows:

“Where there is no camera, there is no humanitarian intervention,” said Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres who later became the Foreign Minister of France. Disaster managers and relief agencies acknowledge the mass media’s key role at times of distress. Yet, the relationship between media practitioners and those managing disasters can often be stressful, difficult and fraught with misunderstandings. Communicating about disasters sometimes ends up as communication disasters.

How can these mishaps be minimised, so that the power of conventional and new media can be harnessed to create more disaster resilient communities? What value addition can the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) bring in? In this book, media and development professionals from across the Asia Pacific share their views based on decades of experience in covering or managing a variety of disasters – cyclones, droughts, earthquakes, floods, landslides and tsunamis.

This book is aimed at journalists, disaster managers and civil society groups who want to use information and communication to create safer societies and communities.

The other book that came out in KL was Digital Review of Asia Pacific, 2007-2008 edition. It was launched during a workshop on Emerging Knowledge Opportunities (The Progress of ICT in Asia-Pacific and Other Parts of the World) on 12 December 2007.

The completely updated edition of the Digital Review of Asia Pacific contains authoritative reports on how 31 economies are using ICT in business, government and civil society written by senior authors who live and work in the region.

I have written the Sri Lanka chapter for the book, continuing a tradition I started back in 2003 with the first edition of the book. I was only sorry that I missed the session during GK3 where the book was launched — because I was moderating another session exactly at the same time in another room. But I was glad to join at least part of the post-launch reception and to meet with some fellow authors who were attending GK3.

Both books are multi-author books, and both have been in the making for a year or longer. It was quite a challenge to get 20 other contributors to come up with their chapters for Communicating Disasters. They were genuinely interested and supportive, but everyone being so busy, it took time and effort to pull together all the strands.

I was not the only common author in these books. My colleague and one-time co-author Chanuka Wattegama (now with LIRNEasia) has written two distinctive chapters on ICTs and disaster communication for the two books.

Many years ago, my friend (now international expert on terrorism and widely published academic author) Rohan Gunaratna told me that writing a book was like waging a small war. I don’t normally use military metaphors, because I deplore all things military, but I can’t resist extending Rohan’s analogy to say that compiling a multi-author book is a bit like waging a mini-war with a coalition of the willing!

“Hands up who is poor, speaks English – and looks good on TV!”

“Hands up who is poor, speaks English – and looks good on TV!”

With that title, I opened my panel remarks to the 8th Annual Symposium on Poverty Research in Sri Lanka on the morning of 30 November 2007.

Sri Lanka’s Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA) had invited me to speak during a session on ‘Taking it off the page: Alternative mediums of communication to influence change’. The theme of the overall symposium was ‘Communicating research and influencing change’.

Part of my talk was on challenges in using moving images to communicate development related research. The other part was on how most sections of the mainstream media covers stories of the poor — or those living at the bottom of the income pyramid.

I noted that as Asia’s billions strive for a better today and better tomorrow, there are millions of stories at the bottom of the pyramid. But most mainstream media manage to miss these stories due to their ignorance, or arrogance, or both.

But reporting from the bottom of the pyramid need not be all about doom, gloom and alarm. In fact, so much is happening there that a well informed story-teller won’t have much time to spend on negativity (while acknowledging a great deal of suffering that remains).

In my remarks, I emphasised that to discover these stories and tell them with empathy and accuracy, we as story-tellers need to recognise a few basic realities:
• The poor are not another species to be treated as if they were endangered! They are living and loving human beings as complex and nuanced as anyone in this room.
• Nor are the poor a ‘sub-human species’ with a simpler set of needs and aspirations. They have as many primary, secondary and tertiary needs – just like anyone else!
• When it comes to information, they have not only survival and practical information needs (which many development projects try to provide), but also what I call ‘information wants’ – cultural and social information – which many development projects completely ignore.
• The poor have opinions too — and are often more articulate and expressive when someone cares to listen and capture these.

So telling media stories from the Bottom of Pyramid needs the knowledge base, socio-cultural understanding and ethical framework in which to gather and process these stories. We at TVE Asia Pacific don’t claim to have got everything right, here are our basic rules of engagement:
• We treat the rich, middle class and poor alike – extending the same courtesy and respect (including obtaining personal clearances for interviews).
• We caption everyone on-screen by name and location, irrespective of their social and economic status.
• We film people – for interviews or generic footage – only with informed consent.
• Wherever possible, we take our the finished TV products back to where they were filmed and share with those who told us their stories. (We are not alone in this: I have written blog posts about Earthcare Films of India and the Brock Initiative of the UK who are also doing this.)

Our industry of broadcast TV is not always known for its class-less treatment of every human being with respect and dignity. In fact, the poor often become ‘Canon-fodder’ for camera crews looking for dramatic images of human suffering.

The globalised media continue to use stereotyped images of the global South – captured mostly by northern photographers and camera crews. As my friend Shahidul Alam, founder of Drik Picture Library in Bangladesh, says: “Invariably, films about the plight of people in developing countries show how desperate and helpless they are…. Wide angle black and white shots, grainy, high contrast images characterise the typical third world helpless victim.”

This explained my title: “Hands up who is poor, speaks English and looks good on TV!” It’s a caricature of how some camera crews go looking for that convenient sound-bite with some doom-and-gloom visuals to match.

But it’s not just the northern media who sensationalise and oversimplify life at the bottom of the pyramid in the South. Many of our own media outlets, rooted in the cities and obsessed with middle class life styles, are also good (or bad) in this game!

And the media are not alone. When development agencies and ‘pro-poor’ activists presume – in their middle class arrogance – that the poor only need survival or sustenance related information, the latter is immediately reduced to sub-human status.

Nov 2005 op ed: Communication rights and communication wrongs

Nov 2006 op ed: Ethical news gathering: Al Jazeera’s biggest challenge

Aug 2007 blog post: Wanted: Ethical sourcing of international TV News

Moving images moving research…beyond academic circles!

Although I’ve dabbled in some media research at times, I don’t think of myself as a researcher. So when Sri Lanka’s Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA) invited me to speak at their 8th Annual Symposium on Poverty Research in Sri Lanka, I spoke on what I know a little bit about — communicating research using the audio-visual media.

My panel remarks, delivered on the morning of 30 November 2007, were on ‘alternative mediums of communication to influence change’. I opened with the provocative title “Hands up who is poor, speaks English – and looks good on TV!” (see separate blog post on media related aspects of my talk).

These days, so much of research in physical, biological and social sciences is justified in the name of poverty reduction. Yes, studying and understanding development problems is the essential first step of solving them. But without properly communicating this research, the results won’t help the poor — or anyone else.

We at TVE Asia Pacific are committed to covering Asia’s development issues using TV, video and web. Our small challenge is to capture the many and varied facets of how Asians are working for a better today and better tomorrow. Reducing and eventually eliminating poverty is a significant part of that process.

As Asia’s billions strive for better lives, there are millions of stories at the bottom of the income pyramid. But most mainstream media manage to miss these stories due to their ignorance, or arrogance, or both.

For us, one key source of information and analysis is researchers – people who study trends and conditions, and keep reflecting on how and why. Their knowledge and insights are invaluable for us to tell stories from and about the bottom of the pyramid.

As I told the researchers in my audience: “Part of our challenge is to know what you are studying — and then figure out the public interest and human interest angles of your work. As communicating research to those outside the scientific or research communities is more an art than a science.”

I cited three recent examples where we had produced engaging TV/video content to communicate research directly relevant or related to the poor.

Digits4Change was our attempt to understand and document how information and communication technologies (ICTs) are changing the way Asians live, work and play. We covered technologies such as Internet, computers, mobile phones and satellite communications applied in education, healthcare and rural business development. The knowledge base for this 2006 series came from IDRC’s Pan Asia programme which supports action research that addresses specific problems.

Also in 2006, we produced The Greenbelt Reports to take a close look at the environmental lessons of the Indian Ocean tsunami. We visited a dozen locations in India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand to find out how community and conservation interests can be balanced in relation to coral reefs, mangroves and sand dunes. In telling these stories, we worked with researchers from global agencies like IUCN the World Conservation Union and UNEP as well as national organisations like the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation in India.

The Greenbelt Reports

Living Labs is our most recent series, released in March 2007. Filmed in 9 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America, it looked at how researchers are addressing different aspects of a major challenge in agriculture: how to grow more food with less water. We worked with a global action research project called the CGIAR Challenge Programme on Water and Food, which gave us exclusive access to their on-going field work and emerging findings in nine major river basins of the developing world.

In telling these and other stories, we work within a certain framework we have defined for ourselves. Among its salient points:
• We don’t set out trying to communicate messages; we just want to tell good stories and development communication is a by-product.
• We look for under-reported/ignored development issues, or a less covered angle in a widely reported story.
• We don’t just talk to technical experts but to many other individuals involved or affected – women, men and children from all walks of life.
• We seek and accommodate different points of view, not allowing single-issue activists or one source to dominate/monopolise a story.
• Our finished products are informed by science but never immersed in science – we always keep in mind that our audience is non-specialsits.

All our stories cover real people dealing with real world issues and challenges. And since Asia has more people living in poverty than anywhere else in the world, most of the time our stories concern what’s happening at the bottom of the pyramid – or what can directly impact people living there.

And without exception, all these TV series and individuals films are available free of any license fees for broadcast, civil society and educational use. They are also available for online viewing at TVE Asia Pacific’s channel on YouTube.

Communicating research through moving images is not easy. Packing years of hard work into a few mins of engaging visuals and narration involves ruthless condensation which sometimes leaves some researcher egos bruised. When covering the work of large research organisations, we’ve also had deal with internal politics and hierarchies: for example, what to do when a junior researcher is more authentic and articulate than her supervisor?

Producing Living Labs based on filming in 9 countries on 3 continents in just 5 months during 2006 was a challenge in both logistics and political negotiations. As editor-in-chief, I had to balance the public accessibility of our end product with researchers’ keenness to pack their stories with facts and figures.

We didn’t please everyone. One senior researcher told us that his multi-faceted, multi-year nad multi-million dollar was like an elephant — and we’d only glimpsed just one part of that big creature!

That’s just the point: we can never cover the whole elephant in a media product intended for non-specialists. So we choose which part of the elephant is most interesting and present it in a way that will make viewers realise — and hopefully, appreciate — that there’s a lot more that’s worth finding out.

Moving image products often act only as ‘teasers’ — communicating highlights of research, and directing those interested to online or offline sources that offer more information.

Because they act as a/v versions of executive summaries, these ‘teasers’ by themselves are a powerful way of reaching out those who are unlikely to look up the details: that includes many policy makers, government officials and business people.

Winston Churchill used to ask his staff to give him everything ‘on one page’. These days, he might have asked for everything to be summed up in a five minute video — as we often do.