majority world – Page 10

Pay it forward: A charming idea for our hard times?

Just imagine…
You do a favour that really helps someone, and tell him/her not to pay it back…
Instead, you ask that it be paid FORWARD to three other people who, in turn, must each pay it forward to three more…and so on.

Impossible? Well, not quite – if you believe (as I do) in the essential goodness of human beings, no matter what their class, race and other divisive factors are.

This idea is known as ‘Pay it forward’. It is really simple: it asks that a good turn be ‘repaid’ by having it done to others instead. Paying it forward has been around as a concept for more than two millennia, from the time of ancient Greece. It was rediscovered in modern times by Benjamin Franklin and later, by Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of my favourite essayists.

In his 1841 essay titled ‘Compensation’, Emerson wrote: “In the order of nature we cannot render benefits to those from whom we receive them, or only seldom. But the benefit we receive must be rendered again, line for line, deed for deed, cent for cent, to somebody.”

During the Twentieth Century, science fiction author Robert A Heinlein popularised the concept in his book Between Planets (1951). It formed the central theme of Pay It Forward (2000), a novel by Catherine Ryan Hyde, which was soon turned into a movie by the same name.

In that story, a thoughtful teacher challenges his seventh grade students with ‘an assignment to save the world’. One perceptive student devices a scheme where one has to carry out three good deeds for others as repayment of a good deed received. Such good deeds should be things that the beneficiaries cannot accomplish on their own.

It was through Pay It Forward the movie, made in 2000 and directed by Mimi Leder, that I first came cross the idea. It’s one of those simple and elegant ideas that packs so much power to change people and the world. Its implementation requires trust, honour and imagination, which most human beings can muster in sufficient quantity when challenged.

Then I realised that, without a conscious plan and not labelling it as such, I was already ‘paying it forward’ myself — and not just to three new people, but many. That was the least I could do for the many breaks, blessings and opportunities I had received in my professional life.

More about that in a minute. First, take a look at the official trailer for Pay it Forward:

And this is how it all started in the movie, with one thoughtful class teacher challenging his seventh grade pupils with ‘an assignment to save the world’:

Here’s an extended, unofficial trailer remixed by a fan using the official trailer, some scenes from the movie and a few interviews with the key stars:

Journalism – especially the industrialised, mainstream version of it – is by definition a highly collaborative business: newspapers, magazines, as well as TV/radio broadcasts are produced by several or many people working together, each playing a specified part.

And because the media are a mirror on our society and our times, the stories we journalists produce just won’t be possible unless our sources share their information, experiences and insights. This is why Bill Moyers, one of the most respected and credible voices in American broadcasting (a land where such professionals are endangered), says: “We journalists are simply beachcombers on the shores of other people’s knowledge, other people’s experience, and other people’s wisdom. We tell their stories.”

During the early years of my career as a science writer and journalist, I was enormously lucky in both respects. I had kind, indulgent, nurturing senior colleagues who showed me the ropes, expecting nothing in return except good stories. And I benefited much from the kindness and thoughtfulness of many accomplished men and women – mostly in the worlds of science, environment and development – who took the time and trouble to talk to me, clarify even basics to a rookie like myself, and allow me to attribute information or quotes them. I was a complete stranger to many of them, yet they cared enough in spite of busy schedules (there were also a few didn’t, but that’s only to be expected).

Then there were opportunities, some competitively earned, others bestowed on me. In those formative years, the opportunities for training, mentoring and other influences sharpened my skills and shaped my worldview. It was easy to grow up angry with the world and seeing conspiracies everywhere; it was much harder to acquire a balanced view of the world and to become a skeptical enquirer without turning into an incurable cynic.

Among those early influences were:
• Working with the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) in India, under the late Anil Agarwal and his worthy successor Sunita Narain
• Regional and international training programmes, organised by various UN agencies and other entities such as the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy
• Invaluable support from the International Science Writing Association (ISWA), which leverages far more benefits than its modest resources would indicate at first glance (again, the power of networking!)
• Editorial training and global syndication from Panos, which provided my first outlet to publish internationally through Panos Features (sadly, no more).

Then there was my mentor Sir Arthur C Clarke, who gave me the rare privilege of spending 21 years as his research assistant — a long and unique apprenticeship that enriched me so much.

These and others helped fill gaps in my formal training in science journalism. And such exposure was worth so much more in the days before commercial internet connectivity. There was no Google or YouTube, and early versions of email were just beginning to roll out.

Just do it, and hope others will keep doing it too...

And now it’s my turn to ‘pay it forward’. It’s plain and simple; there’s no grand pledge or plan. No one asked me to sign up to any binding agreement. There is no spiritual or intellectual compulsion. I just do it, because that’s a good thing to do.

This is why, despite pressure of work, I work with young journalists and producers, organising training workshops through TVE Asia Pacific, or readily agreeing to be a resource person for good programmes organised by others. This is also why I mentor a few eager, committed young professionals in my native Sri Lanka and elsewhere in developing Asia. Read here my tribute to one of them, whose death four years ago was hard to bear. And this is why every year I donate a couple of weeks of my time serving on boards of management of two media/development related charities whose vision and mission I share.

This is also why I spent a good part of my recent Easter/New Year holidays putting together a detailed response to a young script writer who is passionately promoting a film project related to climate change. I have never met him in person, and until a few weeks ago, I’d never heard of him. A cynical British colleague used to caution me that any crazy nut sitting under a banyan tree can write a letter (or more likely an email these days) claiming to be anything he wasn’t. There’s always that risk. But I’m taking my chances.

Years ago I stopped counting the favours I paid forward, and I no longer even keep track of the people that I give little nudges along the way. Being a secular rationalist with no absolutely religious belief of any kind, I don’t collect brownie points for any ‘next world account’. I just do these little good deeds to make this world a little better place.

If further justification were needed, I cannot say it better than Steven Grellet, a prominent French Quaker missionary who once said (and I quote him for its secular essence): “I expect to pass through this world but once; any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now; let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.”

Message placement: Gates Foundation discovers TV soaps are good for health!

There's still time for TV to redeem itself...

In the developing (or majority) world, we have been doing it for years: embedding subtle messages on health, environment, family planning or civic behaviour in popular, highly-rated entertainment shows on television.

In parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America, there is a long history of collaboration among non-formal educators, advocacy groups and broadcast companies to mix entertainment with public education — a difficult balance to achieve without putting off viewers who tune in for entertainment. See, for example, my coverage of the BBC World Service Trust’s work in India.

Now, it seems, this ‘edu-tainment‘ approach is also being tried out seriously in the home of ‘soap operas’ or television drama: the United States.

A recent report in the New York Times describes how the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is working with video production companies and broadcast networks to shape story lines and insert health-related messages into popular entertainment like the television shows “ER,” “Law & Order: SVU” and “Private Practice.”

Already, the foundation’s messages on HIV prevention, surgical safety and the spread of infectious diseases have found their way into these shows.

The report, written by Tim Arango and Brian Stelter, said: “Now the Gates Foundation is set to expand its involvement and spend more money on influencing popular culture through a deal with Viacom, the parent company of MTV and its sister networks VH1, Nickelodeon and BET.”

They called it “message placement”: the social or philanthropic corollary to product placement deals in which marketers pay to feature products in shows and movies. Instead of selling Coca-Cola or G.M. cars, they promote education and healthy living.

Some viewers in television-saturated US might say: it’s about time! In the past, many American companies producing entertainment content have resisted approaches from social activists to use the mass medium for public good.

In the late 1980s, when I shared some Asian experiences of mixing television drama and public education at an international science communication conference in Spain, American academics and journalists in the audience were intrigued. “But this can never happen in the United States…we keep our education and entertainment separate, and with good reason!” one of them said during question time.

Clearly, those hard attitudes have been changing slowly. As the NYT article says: “The efforts of philanthropies to influence entertainment programming is not new…. The Kaiser Family Foundation, which focuses on health issues, has been doing such work for a dozen years. It has worked story lines about H.I.V. and AIDS into programs on CBS and UPN (now known as the CWnetwork), including the reality show “America’s Next Top Model.”

Left, ABC’s “Private Practice,” and NBC’s “Law & Order: SVU.” The story lines of both shows have spread the health-related messages of the Gates Foundation. Images courtesy ABC & NBC

The Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication is at the forefront of blending entertainment with public education. “There’s a lot of research that shows that when a character in a series says, ‘I’m going to be an organ donor,’ it’s effective, more effective than giving out a pamphlet,” said Martin Kaplan, director of the Centre.

The Centre has a Hollywood, Health & Society programme that provides entertainment industry professionals with accurate and timely information for health storylines. It organises meetings between health specialists and script writers for entertainment shows – not just drama, but also reality and variety shows.

“Our view is you don’t have to sacrifice entertainment value to be accurate,” Kaplan is quoted as saying in the NYT article.

That’s a view – and experience – shared by TV writers, producers and programme managers from Mexico to South Africa, and from India to the Philippines. In fact, this is an approach the Gates Foundation should consider rolling out in the majority world countries where they are already a key player in selected areas of health and development. Despite the recent spread of broadband internet, broadcast television is still the dominant mass medium – and primary source of news and entertainment – for most people in much of the developing world. That’s billions of eyeballs we’re talking about – and the cost of producing quality entertainment (even with education subtly embedded in some places) is significantly less than in the west.

In short, Gates can get a bigger bang for its bucks on the airwaves in the global South. And there’s really no need to convince TV industry gate-keepers and producers on how edu-tainment works: they’ve been at it for years, using whatever resources they can find.

Read full article: Messages With a Mission, Embedded in TV Shows, NYT 2 April 2009

Teenage Affluenza: A viral video to stir our minds

I’m a bit anxious about impending teenhood. No, not my own, thank you, but my kid’s.

As a single parent raising a 12-year-old who will soon turn 13, I keep reading and hearing all kinds of advice these days on how best to cope with a teenager in the house — that phase in growing up that everyone predicts will involve some turbulence.

On top of all else that comes with hormones-on-legs, there’s now the worry of Teenage Affluenza. It’s a condition that affects millions of teenagers around the world. Most of them live in the developed countries, but in this topsy-turvey, globalised world, there’s no stopping the rapid spread of such conditions all over the majority world.

Look closely, and you can see the symptoms of TA — Look carefully, and you can see the symptoms of TA - image courtesy WorldVision Australia

I belatedly came across this campaign video called Teenage Affluenza, made by the charity WorldVision Australia in mid 2007. It was first made for a promotion kit for the 40 Hour Famine, to be used in Australian schools. World Vision media staff worked with Rohan Zerna Films, Melbourne, who had worked on previous spots for World Vision. The team decided to take the route of irony, providing a spoof feel. The budget wasn’t high. A family friend of the producer starred as the Melbourne teenager. The voice-over was donated by a regular with World Vision promotions. Overseas footage, already held by World Vision Australia, was spliced into the story.

Read news story in The Age newspaper, Australia, on 2 July 2007

Erin is a fifteen year old girl living deep in the South Eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. She is at risk from teenage affluenza, like five million children and teenagers in her country. She still sleeps in the wooden colonial bed her parents bought her when she was ten. Although meals, travel and education are readily available to girls like Erin, many are forced to live on less than $40 pocket money each week. Erin’s iPod only holds 1 GB.

And so the satirical commentary continues. Juxtaposed with Erin’s ‘tragic life’ is the reality faced by children and teenagers in Vietnam, Sudan and other countries affected by famine and the long term impact of civil war. The video ends with the message “Do something else. Do something real. Do something.”

Teenage Affluenza is Spreading Fast: From WorldVision Australia

The video has attracted thousands of responses on YouTube’s online-comments section, including some honest self-analysis from teenagers, while others started a discussion about who is to blame – corrupt governments or first-world greed.

Meanwhile, WorldVision US has released another version of the video, slightly shorter and featuring American teeangers. If anything, the condition is more prevalent there.

Teenage Affluenza: from WorldVision United States

The message to parents is clear: we’re the ones who can prevent our teenagers from contracting Affluenza. All it takes is thoughtful and sustained action. When teens say gimme-gimme-gimme, we have to known when it’s really needed and when it’s wanted. Easier said than done. I know, because teenages seem to arrive in pre-teens these days.

We the parents would certainly welcome reinforcements from any sensible source. WorldVision Australia runs an interesting website called Stir, which tries to engage youth on issues of development and global justice. As a direct intervention charity, WorldVision doesn’t leave it to governments, but urges people to get involved — and do something.

Mixing oil and water: Media’s challenges in covering human security

Talking to the last drop: All streams flow to Istanbul?

The 5th World Water Forum opens in Istanbul, Turkey, today. It will be held in the historic city – a bridge between the east and west – from 16 to 22 March 2009.

Held every three years, the World Water Forum is the main water-related event in the world. It seeks to put water firmly on the international agenda with a view to fostering collaboration – not confrontation – in sharing and caring for the world’s finite supplies of the life-giving liquid. The forums bring together officials, researchers, activists and media to a few days in which they can drown in their own cacophony…well, almost.

I haven’t been to one of these mega-events – I almost did in 2003, when it was hosted by Kyoto, Japan. That forum was almost entirely eclipsed – as far as the media coverage was concerned – by the United States deciding to invade Iraq during the same week. This inspired me to write an op ed essay on oil, water and media which was syndicated by Panos Features and widely reproduced at the time in newspapers, magazines and even in a few activist and development publications. But six years later, it’s hard to locate it online, so I’m publishing it here, unedited, exactly as I wrote in that eventful week in mid March 2003:

Oil on water: will the media get this Big Story?

By Nalaka Gunawardene: 20 March 2003

“If the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water.” Ismail Serageldin, an eminent Egyptian architect and planner, made this remark in 1995 when he was vice president for sustainable development at the World Bank.

Well, we are in that new century now, but old habits die hard. The war in Iraq has been fuelled by oil interests, and – starting at the time it did, on March 20 –effectively sidelined global talks to secure freshwater for all.

Even as the United States launched its attack on the country that sits on the world’s second largest oil reserve, the Third World Water Forum was in progress at the Japanese cities of Kyoto, Shiga and Osaka. The event, running from March 16 to 23, is this year’s biggest international conference on a sustainable development issue and involved hundreds of government and civil society representatives trying to resolve one of the major survival issues of our time: equitably sharing the world’s finite freshwater resources for our homes, farms and factories.

The two processes cannot be more different. One aims to use force while the other seeks to foster co-operation among nations to cope with water scarcity. The increasingly isolated United States has abandoned the United Nations process in its single-minded determination to disarm Iraq, a nation it considers a major threat to peace and security. Meanwhile in Kyoto, the nations of the world – including, but not led by, the United States – were discussing an issue that is far more central to humanity’s security. It has the full blessings of the UN, which has designated 2003 the International Year of Freshwater.

Yet the water forum seems hardly newsworthy to the major news organisations that are preoccupied with war. For months, the global television networks were gearing up for Iraq war coverage. The first Gulf War helped globalise CNN, and this time around, there are other international and regional channels competing for the eye balls. Locked in a battle for dominant market share, CNN International and BBC World are trying to outdo each other in covering the conflict exhaustively — and to the exclusion of everything else. In the do-or-die media marketplace, ‘soft issues’ such as water are easily edged over by conflict. As cynical news editors will confirm, if it bleeds, it leads.

The notions of national and global ‘security’ – on which the Iraq war is being waged – are relics of the Cold War that are completely out of sync with today’s global realities. Who says we have entered the 21st century?

In the closing decade of the last century, as the world grappled with one crisis after another – ranging from famine and drought to global warming and HIV/AIDS – the notion of ‘security’ was radically redefined to include ecological and social dimensions. What is now termed ‘human security’ is concerned not so much with weapons as with basic human dignity and survival. As first articulated in the UN Development Programme’s Human Development Report in 1994, human security includes safety from chronic threats such as hunger, disease and repression, as well as protection from sudden and harmful disruptions in the patterns of daily life.

The rationale for this was brilliantly summed up by the late Mahbub ul Haq, former Finance Minister of Pakistan and architect of the Human Development Index: “If people are sleeping on pavements, ministers have no business shopping for modern jets and howitzers. While children suffocate in windowless classrooms, generals go about in their air-conditioned jeeps. Nations might accumulate all the weaponry they want, but they have no strength when their people starve…”

A world in which four out of every ten people live in areas of water scarcity is not secure. And if urgent action is not taken, this will increase to two thirds of humanity by 2005. Ensuring water quality is as important as basic access: preventable diarrhoeal diseases – including cholera and dysentery — kill more than seven million children every year. That is 6,000 deaths every day.

James P Grant
James Grant, former executive director of UNICEF, once used a powerful metaphor to describe this scandalous situation: it was as if several jumbo jets full of children were crashing everyday – and nobody took any notice.

If the media are obsessed with death and destruction, why aren’t these numbers registering on their radars? Why is it that silent emergencies forever remain ignored or are only superficially covered? Even statistics don’t set the media agenda: for example, according to the UN, twice as many people are still dying from diarrhoeal diseases as from HIV/AIDS in China, India and Indonesia. But the international donors and media assign far more importance to HIV than to clean water.

No other factor can distort reality as oil. Oil comes on top of water both in the physical world, and in the murky world of global politics. Our collective dependence on petroleum immediately ensures the Iraq war a disproportionately high rank in public and media concerns.

It’s not just the United States that is addicted to oil – we all are. Addicts tend to lose sight of the cost of their dependence, as we have. On 24 March 1989, the oil tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on in Prince William Sound in Alaska and a fifth of its 1.2 million barrels of oil spilled into the sea, causing massive damage to over 3,800 km of shoreline. Investigations implicated its captain for grossly neglecting duty. Shortly afterwards, Greenpeace ran a major advertising campaign with the headline: “It wasn’t his driving that caused the Alaskan oil spill. It was yours.”

Greenpeace continued: “It would be easy to blame the Valdez oil spill on one man. Or one company. Or even one industry. Too easy. Because the truth is, the spill was caused by a nation drunk on oil. And a government asleep at the wheel.”

A nation drunk on oil is waging a war that has more to do with oil than anything else. Our news media are behaving just like cheer-leaders.

War is undoubtedly a big story. But so should be water. One in six humans does not have safe drinking water, and one third of humankind lacks adequate sanitation. We may be living on the Blue Planet, but the waters are muddy and life-threatening to billions.

For sure, a bunch of people huddling together in three Japanese cities won’t solve this crisis overnight. But unless knowledge and skills are shared, and a political commitment is secured, safe water for all will forever remain a pipe dream.

Will it take a full-scale war over water in one of the flashpoints around the world for the military-industrial-media complex take sufficient interest in this survival issue? (That might happen sooner than we suspect.)

It’s ironic that the World Water Forum was undermined by the Iraq war breaking out in the very same week. Washington has now poured oil over everybody’s water.

[Nalaka Gunawardene is an award-winning Sri Lankan science writer, journalist and columnist. He heads TVE Asia Pacific, a regional media organisation working on sustainable development issues, and is on the board of Panos South Asia. The views expressed here are his own.]

Missing Mothers: How acronyms and jargon can kill innocent women

“This year alone, more than 500,000 women will die during pregnancy or childbirth. That’s one woman missing every minute of every day. We call these women ‘missing’ because their deaths could have been avoided. In fact, 80 per cent of maternal deaths could be averted if women had access to essential maternal health services.

“We know where and how these women are dying, and we have the resources to prevent these deaths. Yet, maternal mortality is still one of the most neglected problems internationally.”

This sobering message from Unicef is worth reflecting upon as we mark another International Women’s Day.

Unfortunately, critical issues like these often don’t make the news – or worse, are relegated to the background as inevitable. As Joseph Stalin said in a different context, one death is a tragedy; a million deaths a mere statistic.

The challenge to the development community is to go beyond simply counting deaths in cold, clinical terms. UNICEF has recently released a two minute video, “Missing Mothers” as a tool for international development professionals to use in raising awareness of the issue of mothers dying needlessly.

Having a baby is both a very natural process and a joyous occasion for the parents and extended family concerned. Yet having a baby still remains one of the biggest health risks for millions of women worldwide.

As Unicef’s 2009 State of the World’s Children report reminded us recently, 1,500 women die every day in the world due to complications arising during pregnancy and childbirth. The chances of a woman in developing countries dying before or during childbirth are 300 times greater than for a woman in an industrialised country like the United States. Such a gap does not exist in any other social indicator.

The largest number of maternal deaths in the world is in South Asia. In India alone, an estimated 141,000 women die each year during pregnancy or childbirth. Recently, my Indian journalist friend Kalpana Sharma wrote a perceptive column on this topic in The Hindu newspaper.

She noted: “The solution has been known for years. The problem is the will to make it work. We also know that the solution would benefit everyone, not just women. Yet, affordable and accessible health care, for instance, has not received the thrust that is needed.”

The Missing Women video suggests to activists and campaigners that action can start with five steps: 1. Educate girls, young women and yourself; 2. Respect their rights; 3. Empower them to participate; 4. Invest in maternal health; 5. Protect against violence and abuse. The Unicef website, meanwhile, lists 10 ways in which concerned individuals can make a difference.

All very commendable and necessary — but not sufficient. With all the good intentions in the world, Unicef’s experts and officials come across as, well, detached and geeky. They don’t connect well enough to the real world people whose needs and interests they are genuinely trying to serve. Their messages are lost somewhere in their precise terms, jargon and endless acronyms.

Just take, for example, the very phrase of maternal mortality itself. Precise but also very stiff and dry. Who outside the medical and development circles uses such terms in conversation? When I write or make films about the issue, I prefer to call it ‘mothers dying needlessly while having babies’. Yes, it’s more wordy and perhaps less exacting. But most ordinary people would get what I’m talking about.

If the jargon-ridden language reads dry in text, it completely puts off people when they watch such words being spoken on video. Such films may pander to the Narcissism of Unicef mandarins, but they completely flop in terms of public communication and engagement.

This is the same point I made in October 2008 when commenting on the Unicef-inspired first Global Handwashing Day: “Passion used to be the hallmark of UNICEF during the time of its legendary executive director James Grant, who strongly believed in communicating messages of child survival and well-being. He gave UNICEF a head start in working with the media, especially television.”

Jim Grant’s deputy, journalist Tarzie Vittachi, who came over to the UN children’s agency after a stint at the UN population fund, used to say: “Governments don’t have babies; people do”. We might extend that to: inter-governmental agencies don’t have babies; real women do. That may be why Unicef insists on delivering its life-saving messages so riddled in politically and scientifically correct, but so sterile language.

Unicef’s YouTube channel has a number of short videos related to what they insist on calling maternal mortality. Here’s an example where Unicef’s Chief of Health Dr. Peter Salama says it’s really an unconscionable number of deaths, and a human tragedy on a massive scale:

MDG5: Save Our Moms!
Reducing by three quarters the number of mothers dying needlessly while having babies is one of the Millennium Development Goals or MDGs, the holy grail in international development since the United Nations adopted these in 2000, setting 2015 as the target date.

We have now passed the half way mark, but progress has been patchy and unimpressive. And it will remain so as long as the UN agencies and other development players insist on peddling jargon and acronyms. Considering the issues of life and death involved here, we must view bad communication as a killer — joining the ranks of unsafe drinking water and violence against women and girls.

Writing an editorial for SciDev.Net in September 2005, I noted: “All development workers and UN officials should take a simple test: explain to the least technical person in your office the core message and relevance of your work. Many jargon-using, data-wielding, acronym-loving development workers would probably fail this test. But unless development-speak is translated into simpler language, the MDGs will remain a buzzword confined to development experts and activists.”

I don’t believe in ghosts, but it’s time to bring back the spirits of Jim Grant and Tarzie Vittachi to Unicef to again humanise the agency so mired in its own ‘geekspeak’. The intellectual rigours of evidence-based, scientific analysis must be balanced with clarity and accessibility. It’s fine to be informed by science, but learn to say it simply, clearly and concisely.

The lives of half a million women and millions of children depend on it.

‘The Final Inch’: Real ‘Oscar’ would be polio’s global eradication!

Not longer just a drop in the ocean... — No longer just a drop in the ocean..?

The Final Inch didn’t win the Oscar for the best short documentary film made in 2008. But the nomination has given a boost to the film and its cause: even before its official release in April 2009, it is already raising global awareness on the major public health challenge of banishing polio from the planet.

The Final Inch is a testament of the health workers around the world laboring to make polio the second globally eliminated disease behind small pox, says director Irene Taylor Brodsky.

The 37-minute film, due to air on HBO on 1 April 2009, looks at the “the final stages of a 20 year initiative” to eradicate polio. It focuses the polio vaccine efforts in India and Pakistan, which are among the last four countries where polio is still endemic (the other two being Afghanistan and Nigeria).

Watch the trailer for The Final Inch:

The campaign to eradicate polio is now 21 years old. World Health Organisation (WHO), UNICEF and Rotary Foundation embarked on this campaign in earnest in 1988, and as a young (and equally earnest) science journalist, I remember writing about its early strategies, goals and targets. But the virus has proven to be a lot more stubborn than originally expected.

Well, the campaign has scored remarkable victories, and a little over 1,600 people in the world were stricken by polio in 2008. (AIDS and malaria, in contrast, killed more than three million people.) Compare that with 350,000 cases per year when the global onslaught started, and we see there has indeed been progress.

But the virus – and the crippling disease it causes – persists in several poor, densely populated countries in Asia and Africa. Updates are available from Global Polio Eradication Initiative.

Thus it’s the ‘last inch’ – or last mile, if you like – that’s proving the hardest to traverse. In a perceptive essay published in Newsweek in January 2009, Fred Guterl noted: “It’s not easy to wipe a disease off the face of the planet—especially one like polio, which spreads easily and quickly through contact and occasionally through contaminated food and water. Only one in 200 children who contract the virus shows symptoms (usually paralysis), which makes the other 199 silent carriers.”

It’s not just biology that polio eradicators are up against. Indeed, human superstition and religious dogma have made the final inch particularly contentious and treacherous for public health workers.

In 2005, TVE Asia Pacific started distributing a global documentary on immunisation called Fragile Lives: Immunization at Risk. It showed how at least 2 million children die every year from diseases that that vaccination could easily prevent.

Foot soldiers of the largest non-military army in history engaged in its final battle

At one point, the film takes us to Uttar Pradesh, in northern India, to show how polio, eradicated in most of the world, stubbornly persists in a few countries. This very poor state with its 272 million inhabitants had two thirds of the world’s polio. We talk to the glamorous young cricketer, Mohamed Kaif, who helps publicise a massive campaign to get every single child to the vaccination booths. The film discovers the strange reason behind why so many Muslim parents refuse to have their children vaccinated.

The Final Inch features the heroic efforts of Munzareen Fatima, a field worker in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, who is a part of UNICEF’s Social Mobilisation Network for ensuring vaccination coverage. She reaches out to her target group through personal and public intervention programmes.

As she told IANS: “It has been a tough journey for me over the last five years to convince 470 families at Dufferin block in Khairnagar to administer polio drops to their children. I met with resistance from the families, who initially refused to immunise their children. The conservative community also belittled me for stepping out of home to campaign against polio.”

India is not alone. If anything, misplaced resistance to polio vaccination has been stronger in Pakistan. As IPS reported in August 2006, the country’s drive against polio was hit by both rumours and litigation.

The news story, filed by Ashfaq Yusufzai in Peshawar, noted: “The reliability and safety of oral polio vaccine (OPV) has been put under scrutiny in Pakistan after wild rumours that it causes impotency snowballed into a writ petition in a high court.”

Bill Gates: geek power and bucks to battle polio...

Religion-inspired superstitions have often stood in the way of achieving sufficient vaccination coverage, leaving room for viruses to spread again. Religious leaders sometimes strengthen the hand of those making pseudoscientific claims, says South African science writer George Claassen. Writing in SciDev.Net in April 2008, he noted: “Attempts to eliminate polio in Nigeria, for example, ran into problems when Datti Ahmed, the chair of the Supreme Council for Sharia in Kano state, referred to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative as ‘modern-day Hitlers… who have deliberately adulterated the oral polio vaccines with antifertility drugs and contaminated them with certain viruses which are known to cause HIV and AIDS.'”

This brings up an interesting scenario of virus vs. virus. Richard Dawkins, the well known British evolutionary biologist and writer, has called religion the most malevolent form of a ‘mind virus’. According to Dawkins, faith − belief that is not based on evidence − is one of the world’s great evils. He claims it to be analogous to the smallpox virus, though more difficult to eradicate.

Of course, the mistrust of vaccines is not just limited to the developing world, nor is it always inspired by religion or superstition. Sometimes over-protective moms can be just as irrational. Fragile Lives, for example, took us to Dublin, Ireland, where there have been two serious outbreaks of measles – largely due to mothers rejecting vaccination because of the MMR controversy. In some parts of Ireland only 60% instead of the necessary 95%, have been vaccinated.

Sharing archives: Will broadcasters (finally) put planet before profit?

I have long wondered if both radio and TV broadcasters store their archival material in black holes – into which everything disappears and nothing ever comes out. And certainly, nothing is shared with anyone else.

In a widely reproduced and commented op ed essay written for SciDev.Net in November 2008, titled Planet before profit for climate change films, I noted:
“It isn’t just climate-related films that are locked up with copyright restrictions. Every year, hundreds of television programmes or video films — many supported by public, corporate or philanthropic funds — are made on a variety of development and conservation topics.

“These are typically aired once, twice or at best a few times and then relegated to a shelf somewhere. A few may be released on DVD or adapted for online use. But the majority goes into archival ‘black holes’, from where they might never emerge again. Yet most of these films have a long shelf life and could serve multiple secondary uses outside the broadcast industry.”

Escape from the Southern 'black hole'?

Well, it seems things are changing, albeit very slowly. Last month, we welcomed the announcement from Al Jazeera sharing their news footage online through a Creative Commons license — the first time that video footage produced by a news broadcaster is released for commercial and non-commercial use.

Now comes the news that Australia’s public broadcaster ABC is releasing selected content from its vast archives for non-commercial use by others. And we must thank Charles Darwin for that.

On 12 February 2009, to celebrate Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, ABC started releasing some archival materials, all based loosely around the theme of evolution and mutation. This Australian first was achieved through ABC’s collaborative media site, Pool.

In an imaginatively named effort called Gene Pool, ABC started off with a recording from its archives of genetics professor Steve Jones talking about Darwin’s life and work.

The next offering to Gene Pool would be a clip from ABC’s Monday Conference in 1971 featuring Stanford entomologist Paul Ehrlich talking about climate change (yes, it’s from 38 years ago!).

These materials are being released under the Creative Commons 3.0 licence allowing people to reuse or remix them in any way they like — as long as it’s for non-commercial use.

On Gene Pool website, ABC said: “You can also create your own work exploring the themes of evolution and mutation in lateral ways, and share them back into the Gene Pool.”

As Creative Commons Australia explained: “This means that people can tweak, twist and remix the files to create their own creative interpretation of the themes of evolution and mutation, and share these results with the rest of the world. The idea is to build a whole community up around the project, remixing and reusing the ABC archival material in new and previously unthought of ways. This all culminates in a public exhibition of Gene Pool pieces at Melbourne’s RMIT on November 24th – the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s book The Origin of Species.”

They added: “Just imagine what gems might be hidden away in ABC filing cabinets, waiting to be discovered and put to good use by the population that payed for them in the first place.”

That’s precisely what I’ve been saying for a long time – the taxpayer-funded broadcasters like BBC, NHK or ABC (and their equivalents in other countries) have no moral right to lock away their archives on legal or technical grounds. And to think that some of the content thus held up could actually help us in winning history’s eternal race between education and catastrophe!

Nothing escapes from this one...for now

The BBC – hailed as a model public broadcaster worldwide – is among the worst offenders on this count. It holds one of the largest archives on environment, natural history and wildlife filmed all over the planet for several decades, yet it stubbornly refuses to share this material with anyone, even when it’s only for strict non-commercial, educational use. Read one example in my July 2007 blog post, The Lawyers who locked up the Butterfly Tree.

This myopic selfishness is contrasted (and put to shame) by exceptional film-makers like Richard Brock (who worked with BBC Natural History Unit for 35 years before leaving it unhappy over its rights management) who have decided to open up their personal video archives for non-commercial use especially in the majority world where such material is in short supply.

We can only hope that ABC’s move would build up pressure on the stubborn old Auntie BBC to finally relent. In fact, this might be a chance for all those public broadcasters – many of them now ‘Aunties without eyeballs’ – to redeem themselves at last, ending decades of copyrights tyranny. (And if that puts their inhouse lawyers out of a job, they can join greedy bankers now lining up for public forgiveness!)

ABC says about its tentative steps to the world of open archives: “It’s a small offering to start but there’ll be a lot more to come. We’re working madly behind the scenes getting clearance to release more more more.”

Watch this space…and keep an eye on that Gene Pool!

Return of (true) Mass Media: Let there be millions of sparkling conversations!

“Historically, organised and commercialised mass media have existed only in the past five centuries, since the first newspapers — as we know them — emerged in Europe. Before the printing press was invented, all news was local and there were few gatekeepers controlling its flow. Having evolved highly centralised systems of media for half a millennium, we are now returning to a second era of mass media — in the true sense of that term. Blogs, wikis and citizen journalism are all signs of things to come.”

This is how Sir Arthur C Clarke and I summed up the transformative change that is currently taking place in the world of mass media, in an essay we co-wrote for the Indian news magazine Outlook in October 2005.

We’d given it the title ‘From Citizen Kane to Citizen Journalist’ – a formulation that I’m still proud of – but the editors changed it to ‘Arise, Citizen Journalist!’. Of course, our original title made evocative sense only for those who knew the popular culture reference to the movie Citizen Kane.

I recently had a chance to revisit these issues and explore them further in a half-hour, in-depth TV interview with media researcher/activist and fellow citizen journalist Sanjana Hattotuwa. This was part of The Interview series produced by Young Asia Television, and broadcast on two Sri Lankan TV channels, TNL and ETV during the second week of February 2009.

Sanjana covered a wide range in his questions. Starting with a brief reflection on my 21-year association with Sir Arthur Clarke, we moved on to the bewildering world of new media and its co-existence with the mainstream media. We discussed the fragmentation of audience and the concern that some current and would-be bloggers harbour: is anyone listening or reading?

And more importantly, how do we get conversations started and going. I look back on my own experience as an active blogger for almost two years, and assert that if we have something new and worthwhile to say, and know how to express it well, we can slowly build up an audience. There’s no blueprint or road map – everything is in ‘beta’ mode, and the name of the game is try-it-and-see!

Here’s that full interview on YouTube, broken into four parts:

Sanjana Hattotuwa talks to Nalaka Gunawardene – Part 1 of 4:

Sanjana Hattotuwa talks to Nalaka Gunawardene – Part 2 of 4:

Sanjana Hattotuwa talks to Nalaka Gunawardene – Part 3 of 4:

Sanjana Hattotuwa talks to Nalaka Gunawardene – Part 4 of 4:

The quest for next David Attenborough continues…

Human Ambassador to the natural world...David Attenborough

I spent most of today at the Wildscreen film festival being held at the British Council Colombo. Naturalist and broadcaster Sir David Attenborough featured prominently in two films screened: Can We Save Planet Earth? (2006) and Life in Cold Blood: Armoured Giants (2008).

For me, it was more than a fascinating journey to far corners of our endangered planet in the company of the world’s best known broadcaster, and Britain’s most trusted public figure. I recalled how in this very venue, as an eager teenager growing up in the simpler, pre-web days of the 1980s, I watched his pioneering series Life on Earth (1979) and The Living Planet (1984). These path-breaking series redefined how natural history documentaries were made, and inspired a whole new generation of film-makers and nature lovers. A quarter century later, I’m still hooked.

Over the last 25 years, Attenborough has established himself as the world’s leading natural history programme maker with more landmark series: The Trials of Life (1990), The Private Life of Plants (1995), The Life of Birds (1998), The Life of Mammals (2002) and Life in the Undergrowth (2005). The final chapter in the ‘Life’ series is Life in Cold Blood (2008).

As fellow broadcaster Jeremy Paxman noted in a Time magazine tribute to Attenborough: “Life After Death is almost the only natural-history series yet to be made by Attenborough. In a career that has taken him to every corner of the world, he has explored life in all its richness — from mammals and birds to plants and reptiles. No living person has done more to make the people of Planet Earth aware of the world around them.”

But as I wrote in May 2007, “like all creatures big and small in the great Circle of Life that Sir David has so avidly told us about, he too is mortal. At 81, it’s time for the world to look for the next David Attenborough.”

In his Time tribute, Paxman noted that what distinguishes Attenborough is “that boundless, schoolboyish enthusiasm, the infectious joy of discovering the infinite variety of life”. Yet as the popular song goes, dragons live forever, but not so little boys – so the quest for the next Attenborough has quietly preoccupied the minds of many practising or following the world of natural history and environmental film making.

I’m not obsessed with this question (and I wish Sir David many more years of life on Earth and life on the airwaves), but I today popped it to Jeremy Bristow, a producer of environmental programmes at BBC Television, at the end of his fascinating master class on The role of films in Environmental Conservation. Jeremy’s most recent project has been two films hard-hitting films on Climate Change with Sir David Attenborough for BBC1 and the Discovery Channel.

The bad news is that despite searching far and wide – even some competitions – the David Attenborough has yet to be discovered.

“There are many talented, passionate natural history film makers and some of them also have good screen presence — but none to match Sir David,” said Jeremy Bristow. “I know many in the natural history film world have kept their eyes open for a potential successor.”

Perhaps Sir David is a unique product of his time and circumstances, Jeremy speculated. Certainly, there weren’t too many getting into this business in the early days of television broadcasting. The first major programme series to feature Sir David was BBC’s Zooquest, which ran from 1954 to 1963. And then, one thing led to another…and more than 50 years later, he’s still in the business.

To me, it’s the voice – authoritative without at all being pompous or pontificating – that gives Sir David enduring and endearing appeal. Time called it ‘the voice of the environment’.

Now is the time when that voice of reason, moderation and passion is needed more than ever. A time when the natural world is under siege from human-induced accelerated climate change even as the world of science takes daily beatings from assorted fundamentalist forces.

At 82, Sir David still remains not just our most versatile ambassador to the natural world, but also one of the best spokespersons for the rigors of science and intellectual curiosity.

Here’s a recent example of Sir David – taking us on a quick, animated guide to evolution of life on Earth, in a 2009 documentary called Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life to mark 150 years since Charles Darwin published his famous Origin of the Species:

Bill Gates and mosquitoes: World’s top geek now works for its meek

Bill Gates can’t seem to get enough of bugs.

On 4 February 2009, he let loose a swarm of mosquitoes at the TED 2009 technology, entertainment and design conference in California to highlight the dangers of malaria.

“Malaria is spread by mosquitoes,” he reminded his audience of leading scientists, designers, researchers and entrepreneurs. Turning to an upturned jar on stage, he announced: “I brought some. Here…I’ll let them roam around. There is no reason only poor people should be infected.”

Luckily, the mosquitoes were not carrying the disease. But it had the intended effect. Wired editor Chris Anderson, curator of the show, suggested a headline: “Gates releases more bugs into the world”.

Watch Bill Gates’s mosquito moment:

Watch the full 20-minute video of Bill Gates at TED 2009

As stunts go, this one was pretty mild and harmless. There are many shocking ways in which the harsh daily realities of the world’s poor can be brought into gatherings of the rich and famous. They could be served glasses of the contaminated, sludgy (and often smelly) water that tens of millions drink everyday. Or all the toilets could be locked up and the keys thrown away – for good. Or electricity supply could be cut off, or frequent ‘black-outs’ or ‘brown-outs’ could be staged. You get the idea…

Of course, few event organisers would dare try any of these, if only for health and safety considerations. Reminds me of a rare exception: when he was director of information with the UN’s population agency (UNFPA), journalist-turned-UN official Tarzie Vittachi once hosted delegates of a high level meeting to lunch which consisted soley of a bread roll and a glass water. He told his guests: the meal was better more than what most poor people in the global South on any given day.

Meanwhile, billions of poor and needy – and not just those in the majority world – are glad that Bill Gates caught the ‘development bug’ and has switched his formidable creative energies (not to mention his billions) to address their survival issues. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – which carefully manages the giving away of Gates wealth – operates on the belief that all lives have equal value. “We think all people deserve the chance to have healthy, productive lives”.

They have set priorities such as improving health and reducing extreme poverty in the developing world, and improving high school education in the United States.

The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recently described it as a paradox: “In these brutal economic times, one of the leading advocates for the world’s poorest people is one of the richest.”

He noted: “Mr. Gates ended his full-time presence at Microsoft last July and since then has thrown himself into work at his foundation. He is now trying to do to malaria, AIDS, polio and lethal childhood diarrhea what he did to Netscape, and he just may succeed.”

In his TED talk, Bill Gates addressed two questions that occupy much of his time these days: How do we stop Malaria? How do you make a teacher great?

He said: “The market does not drive scientists, thinkers, or governments to do the right things. Only by paying attention and making people care can we make as much progress as we need to.”

He called for greater distribution of insect nets and other protective gear, and revealed that an anti-malaria vaccine funded by his foundation and currently in development would enter a more advanced testing phase in the coming months.

“I am an optimist; I think any tough problem can be solved,” he said. That’s the geek in him talking: marshall all information, analyse problems, respond strategically — and keep at it.

A friend who now works with the Gates Foundation confirms how the charity seeks evidence and rigour in all its social investments. This is no bleeding-heart do-gooding or ‘social work’ for its CSR value. The new wave of geeks lining up to serve the meek bring business acumen to the development sector long under-served by unimaginative aid agencies and self-serving UN organisations.

As Kristof wrote: “Gates ended his full-time presence at Microsoft last July and since then has thrown himself into work at his foundation. He is now trying to do to malaria, AIDS, polio and lethal childhood diarrhea what he did to Netscape, and he just may succeed.”

Gates has announced that despite the economic crisis the Gates Foundation will increase spending by US$500 million this year.

In late January 2009, the billionaire philanthropist released the first ‘Annual Letter from Bill Gates‘ where he discussed his work at the foundation and spoke candidly about what has gone well, what hasn’t.

He compared his earlier work at Microsoft with the challenges he now tackles at the charitable foundation. “What I’ve found now is that really those same key elements are there. The opportunity for big breakthroughs is absolutely just as great–now it’s vaccines, it’s seeds that have better yield, it’s ways of sharing teaching practices…they will take the same kind of patience that we had for software breakthroughs.”

Just ahead of the letter’s release, Nicholas Kristof talked with Bill Gates about why aid to developing countries is more important during the economic downturn and vaccine breakthroughs on the horizon. Watch the interview:

Read: Bill Gates’s Next Big Thing by Nicholas D Kristoff, published in the New York Times on 24 January 2009