Poverty – Page 11 – Open Minds!

The view from a Dhaka gutter: South Asia’s urban nightmare

There I was, coming out of a Dhaka gutter, badly shaken and splattered with the mega-city’s assorted muck.

A minute earlier, I had stepped right into it in the semi-darkness of the evening. I had no idea it was coming. One moment I was walked on the side of a busy but not-too-well-lit street in the Bangladeshi capital. The next, I was thigh-deep inside an open drain carrying municipal waste and drain water.

In the fading light, the blackness of the tarred road and the gutter water merged seamlessly, creating an illusion of solid surface.

My friend Shahidul Alam (below, right, with me in a happier moment), who was a few feet away, moved fast and pulled me out. As I felt my legs and feet, I realised how lucky I had been: in spite of falling two feet deep, I was unhurt – no cuts and bruises, not even a scrape (thank goodness I was wearing shoes).

Shahidul was taking me out for dinner, and then to the airport, but Dhaka’s evening traffic had wrecked our plans. We were caught in an enormous jam caused by Bashundhara City, the US Dollar 100 million shopping mall said to be South Asia’s largest (and 12th largest in the world). There was some incongruity in that, but we were keen to get to a restaurant where we had a rendezvous with some other friends.

In the event, we were too delayed and I was risking missing my flight. So Shahidul, the excellent host that he always is, decided to buy me some take-away food that I could eat on the way to the airport. He parked his car near a wayside eatery, and called me out to choose what I’d like.

I was walking a few steps behind him when I fell into the open, concealed gutter.

If I had to fall right down to Earth, I couldn’t have chosen a better date: it was Earth Day, 22 April 2006.

After I was pulled out of the gutter, we had to move quickly. I was three hours away from my flight to Singapore, and there was no way any airline would carry someone in my condition. I had already checked out of my Dhaka hotel, and in any case that was almost two hours behind us in another part of the city.

Shahidul approached the staff in a nearby restaurant – a very ordinary one – and explained what had happened. The Bengali hospitality and kindness snapped into action. I was given immediate access to their modest wash room, where I washed and changed into clothes pulled out of my travel bag.

I had to reluctantly dump my well-used pair of shoes. Shahidul lent me his sandals, and found a taxi to rush me to the airport while he’d team up with the others to join the belated dinner.

I made it to the airport – and the flight – in good time. And as far as I could tell, no one gave me strange looks as I winged my way to Singapore. After all that excitement, I even managed to get some sleep on the flight.

But I had no illusions about what happened. For one thing, I’d escaped with no injury of any kind. For another, I had merely glimpsed and only very slightly experienced a daily reality for millions of city dwellers across developing Asia.

I should know. I live in suburban Colombo, the Sri Lankan capital, which has its own problems of waste disposal and cleanliness. The only difference is that in mega-cities like Dhaka (estimated population close to 12 million), the issues are multiplied and magnified.

We who live in middle class ‘oases’ within these cities tip-toe around the worst realities that the poorer citizens grapple with on a daily basis. They lack the choices that we have.

As a development journalist, I’ve written about urban sprawl, mega-cities and environmental challenges in developing Asia, where more people are now living in cities than ever before in history. UN Habitat says half of humanity has now become city dwellers. With their misleading image as centres of vast opportunity and prosperity, cities are a magnet to millions of rural poor. Like Dick Wittington, who thought the streets of London were paved with gold, they migrate to towns and cities in search of better lives. Most end up swelling the already burgeoning cities, exchanging their rural poverty for urban squalor.

Falling thigh-deep into a Dhaka gutter for a minute or two is no big deal when compared to the unsafe, unclean environments that they live in, every day and every night.

And they can’t just walk into a wayside restaurant, wash away the muck, and catch the next flight to clean, safe and landscaped Singapore.

Read my December 2006 essay, Grappling with Asia’s Tsunami of the Air

Photograph by Dhara Gunawardene

The return of the ‘Donnish young man’

Some of my friends who read this blog think I’m fond of name dropping. It’s just that I keep meeting some really interesting and accomplished people as I travel around the world in the course of my work.

Each such encounter enriches me. I write about some of these here to share that joy and inspiration.

Remember I wrote about Robyn Williams , the doyen of science broadcasting in Australia, and his analogy of science journalists and whales?

Well, Robyn and I are among the few participants at the Fifth World Conference of Science Journalists here in Melbourne who were also at the first such conference, some 15 years ago. That was held in Tokyo, Japan, in the Fall of 1992.
Jim Cornell, president of the International Science Writers Association (IWSA) is another.

In Tokyo, Jim Cornell invited me to join a panel discussion on science journalism in the developing countries. I was 26 at the time, and was on my first visit to Japan. All these years later, I can’t recall everything I said. But I remember how I quoted Karan Singh, a former minister of population in India, to the effect that in many poor countries where survival was a daily struggle, ‘Development is the best contraceptive’.

Robyn Williams picked this up in an account of the conference he wrote up in UNESCO Sources, the monthly magazine published by the UN’s science agency. He described me as ‘a donnish young man from Sri Lanka’!

I’ve been trying to live this down ever since.

50? In South African terms, you’re probably dead!

“How many of you are over 50?” asked Christina Scott, South African journalist and broadcaster.

Half a dozen hands went up.

“Come on, now – be honest,” Christina urged. One more hand joined.

“In South African terms, chances are that you’re already dead,” she declared.

Christina was talking about stark realities of living and dying in today’s South Africa, which is one of the highest HIV infection rates in the world.

We were at a session on ‘Life and Death in 2020: How will science respond?’ during the Fifth World Conference of Science Journalists, currently underway in Melbourne.

Christina Scott - image courtesy IPS

Christina then asked how many in her audience were aged between 30 and 35. This time, four hands shot up.

“If you were in South Africa, you’re probably infected with HIV, and don’t know it yet — and go around giving it to others,” she told them.

After getting her audience shocked and hooked, Christina talked about how HIV is cutting across social hierarchies and colour barriers in her country.

Many intervention strategies to contain HIV have been based on the premise that when people know more, they are more likely to change risky behaviour. “We now see that greater wealth or higher levels of access to information alone do not change people’s behaviour. In fact, the middle classes lull themselves into thinking that HIV is a poor people’s disease, when it’s not,” she said.

In other words, it’s not a linear process and is much nuanced.

Christina was doubtful if Internet, PCs and online communications could make much headway in reaching out a majority of South Africans. It’s not just a lack of connectivity and computers, but a more basic absence of electricity in many areas.

To her, old fashioned radio was still the most cost-effective way to reach more people quickly.

One new ICT that has taken sub-Saharan African by storm is mobile phones. “They are everywhere, and people are using them for all sorts of things — including sexual transactions.”

She was cautiously optimistic about prospects for combating HIV. “AIDS is like a war: it’s very nasty, and causes a lot of damage. But as in war, it also spurs innovation and responses,” she said.

An AIDS vaccine is not the answer, as the virus keeps mutating and in any case distributing the vaccine to all those who need it will be a huge challenge.

Her personal wish: her daughter of 15 to get through college without contracting HIV.

Note: Christina works as Africa consultant for the Science and Development Network.

Say MDG and smile, will ya?

There we go again!

I have just done another post on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), pleading that the core issues they promote be given due prominence than simple brand promotion for MDGs and their promoters-cum-custodians (the UN).

For my readers outside the charmed development circles, MDGs are an international blueprint for human development, with eight major goals to be achieved by 2015. These goals are the means of implementing the Millennium Declaration — to which 189 governments committed at the UN Millennium Summit held in 2000.

One way to ensure the governments will keep their promise is to turn media spotlight on them. Journalists and media managers have a key role to play in this process.

With this in mind, our friends at the Asia Pacific Institute for Broadcasting Development (AIBD) have launched the Asia Pacific MDG Media Awards to ‘recognise and honour the best media reporting on the MDGs’. They have the backing of two UN agencies (UNDP and UNESCAP) and the Asian Development Bank. The deadline for applications is 15 April 2007.

See TVE Asia Pacific news item on Asia Pacific MDG Media Awards

All this is well and good — except that the rules of the award scheme are a bit self-limiting. There’s one that I’ve only just noticed: “Reference to the MDGs (whether one or all MDG Goals) in your content is mandatory.”

This places wrong emphasis on MDG branding when it should be on the actual issues. MDGs are not another slogan for spin doctors at UN agencies to play around with for a few years until the next development fad comes along.

MDGs are about human dignity and social justice to the half of humanity that currently lives in poverty, squalor and deprivation. It is these real world people who lose their babies to preventable childhood diseases; drop out of school because they cannot afford to stay on; die needlessly in their millions during pregnancy or childbirth; or go to bed hungry every night.

In that bigger scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter whether justice is delivered through strategies, programmes and projects labelled ABC, XYZ, MDG or something else.

Besides, MDGs are a means to an end. The process is important, but branding is not, on that journey.

Half way along the way — to the agreed target of 2015 — an informed and motivated media can help countries and development players to remain focused.

By all means, reward good journalistic coverage of development and social justice issues underscored by the MDGs. But please, let’s not turn this into another round of simple publicity and self-promotion for UN agencies.

MDG Asia Pacific website

AIBD documents on Asia Pacific MDG Media Awards

MDG: A message from our spin doctors?

References to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are popping out of every UN document, speech and communication product these days. Each agency and official seem to be keen to outdo all others in living and swearing by this new ‘development mantra’ of our times.

MDGs are an international blueprint for human development, with eight major goals to be achieved by 2015. These goals are the means of implementing the Millennium Declaration — to which 189 governments committed at the UN Millennium Summit held in 2000.

But important as they are, the MDGs are only a means to an end, even if an extremely worthwhile one. If we lose sight of that, we risk allowing the MDG ‘dog’ to wag the development ‘dog’.

Alfonso Gumucio Dagron

Speaking at OUR Media 6 conference in Sydney this week, Alfonso Gumucio-Dagron, Managing Director – Programmes of the Communication for Social Change Consortium, cautioned about development agencies engaging in too much spin or public relations, and too little real communication.

Alfonso, a widely experienced and highly respected practitioner and thinker in development communication, lamented how institutional publicity is taking a much higher priority than communication as a social process that gives a voice to the communities and players involved.

Ah, finally a dev-com heavyweight echoes what I’ve been saying for some time! At every UN and media platform I could access in the past couple of years, I’ve stressed that catalysing wide ranging public discussion and debate on the MDGs’ core issues is far more important than simply enhancing ‘brand recognition’ for MDGs themselves. (That’s useful too, but as part of a wider process.)

On the eve of the MDG+5 Summit at UN Headquarters in September 2005, I wrote in an editorial published by SciDev.Net:

Today’s MDG promoters need to revisit some of the more successful development efforts of the past few decades — such as promoting universal human rights, eradicating smallpox, popularising oral rehydration salts, and wiping out Southern debt — and study the role good communication played in each.

Those in the UN system, in particular, have to find more creative ways of getting the MDG message across. In my view, MDG ‘branding’ is not what is important; it is the core set of issues that MDGs embody that need mass attention and aggressive promotion.

We should also invoke the memory of past visionary leaders who navigated the treacherous inter-governmental minefields to talk truth to power. One was James Grant, former executive director of the UN children’s agency, turned UNICEF into a formidable global brand.

One of Grant’s enduring remarks concerned the silent emergency of several thousand children (and adults) dying everyday from preventable diarrhoeal diseases. It was, he pointed out repeatedly, as if several jumbo jets full of children were crashing everyday — and nobody took any notice.

That metaphor might lack political correctness in the post-11 September era. But the message was loud and clear. Grants’ one time deputy at UNICEF, Tarzie Vittachi, was another master at summing up complex development issues in memorable ways. When he was head of information at the UN population agency, the former newspaper editor used to remind everyone: ‘Governments don’t have babies; people do.’

Read my full editorial in SciDev.Net in September 2005: Simpler words are needed to get MDG message across

Caught between mines and starvation

Today, April 4, is being observed worldwide as Mine Action Day.

The UN General Assembly declared the International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action, which was first observed in 2006.

Mine Action says on its website:“Landmines and explosive remnants of war continue to kill or injure as many as 15,000 people a year. The overwhelming majority are civilians who trigger these devices years or even decades after a conflict ends. In some countries, such as Afghanistan, the majority of victims are under the age of 18.

Some progress has been made. Mine action programmes and the anti-personnel mine-ban treaty or “Ottawa Convention,” have contributed to a reduction in the annual number of casualties from an estimated 26,000 10 years ago to between 15,000 and 20,000 today.

But not nearly enough. I remember a short video film I watched during my first visit to Cambodia in mid 1996. After 30 years of civil war, Cambodia was left with a deadly legacy of between 4 and 6 million landmines – nobody knows quite how many. And progress has been slow to detect, deactivate and remove these millions of death-traps lying all around in this one of the poorest countries in Asia.

Our friends at the Women’s Media Centre of Cambodia, a media advocacy group run by women, showed me a campaign video they had made advocating mine action. Used for screenings at key UN meetings in Geneva and New York, it showed the plight of poor Cambodians, especially women and children, who have no choice but to live and work with landmine hazards.

Sorry, a decade later I can’t recall the title of this film. A Google search didn’t bring up any links either. But there was a sequence that I remember well.

In rural Cambodia, some women spoke their mind about the many hazards that surround them, small arms and landmines being just two of them.

What’s our choice here, one woman asked. “Everytime we step out of our homes and go to the fields, we can get blown up by a landmine. Yet if we stay at home, we will starve to death.”

She’s not alone. Millions of people – women, children and men – across the global South face this reality everyday. The men in suits in Geneva and New York, who issue lofty statements on mine action from the safety of their glasshouses, need to be aware of this stark choice.

Note: Women’s Media Centre in Cambodia does some good work. At the time we worked with them, they were running an FM radio station, producing lots of videos, and training Cambodian women to use media to support development and personal advancement.

The ‘Children of Brundtland’, 20 years on

On 30 March 2007, I was part of a South Asian Workshop to pre-test a pilot e-module on Science Journalism. Held at the University of Hyderabad, India, it brought together a small group sharing a passion for science journalism and science communication. It was organised by SciDev.Net with support from UNESCO.

I used my remarks to pay tribute to an important and lasting influence on my own career as a development communicator: Our Common Future, report of the Brundtland Commission that came out exactly 20 years ago. The anniversary was marked by a few organisations like IIED, but I felt it deserved better observance.

Here’s an extract from my remarks:

Within a few months of my entering active journalism, something happened globally that left a deep impression on me -– and as I later found out, on many others like myself in different parts of the world. In March 1987, the World Commission on Environment and Development –- chaired by the then Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland -– published its final report. Titled Our Common Future, it was the first of its kind to draw broad links between environmental, social and economic concerns and it made international policy recommendations accordingly. It prompted the UN to convene the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

The Report didn’t invent the concept or term sustainable development, but it certainly helped popularise it. The Commission’s work helped the environmental movement to evolve from the tree-hugging, whale-saving, cuddly animal level to a higher and multi-faceted level of environmental management.

And it inspired a generation of young journalists, educators and activists worldwide. I count myself among them –- in that sense, we are all Children of Brundtland.

IIED London takes stock of 20 years after Brundtland Commission Report