Filed under: BBC World Service Trust, Nike Foundation | Tags: Al Jazeera, Arab Spring, BBC World Service Trust, Egypt, Facebook, Girl Hub, Libya, Nike Foundation, Syria, Tunisia, Twitter
I’ve just finished two big projects, and so I’m about to take a break. One of them has involved writing a report for the Nike Foundation’s Girl Hub initiative. It will be published in full before long, but here’s a flavour:
For anyone interested in how media can enable social change, the Arab Spring of 2011 is an ultimate case study. The self-sacrifice of Mohamed Bouzizi on a street in Tunis has led to a wave of popular action in Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Oman, Libya and beyond. Commentators have been quick to claim these events as a Twitter revolution or a Facebook revolution, leading to the emergence of a new term: Wikirevolution. As Don Tapscot declared, “the Internet radically drops the cost of dissent” .
The divide between ‘new media thinking’ and
‘old media thinking’ should be
a thing of the past.
The Arab Spring has also been claimed as evidence of the Al Jazeera Effect: a decade of transnational Arab TV across the Middle East has led to an increasing sense of transnational Muslim and Arab political identity – at the expense of national political identities. Indeed, protestors in Tahrir Square on Feb. 6 were heard chanting “Long Live Al Jazeera!”, and the Egyptian government attempted to block the stations satellite transmissions, shut down its offices and detained its journalists.
The truth is likely to be a combination of all of these factors: access to social media applications and mobile phones enabled protesters to organise, whilst Al Jazeera coverage provided information about events, and a sense of legitimacy of purpose. As Foreign Policy reports:
While Al Jazeera was showing hundreds of thousands of people calling for the end of the regime, Egyptian TV showed humdrum scenes of traffic quietly passing by; when Al Jazeera reported hundreds of people queuing for bread and petrol, Egyptian TV showed happy shoppers with full fridges using footage filmed at an unknown time in the past.
As Al Jazeera journalist Danny Schechter writes on the station’s blog :
Social media and TV media can work together. They converge as much as diverge, building a cumulative impact and reinforcing each other. But it is the people who stand up to resolve their grievances that made it happen. They deserve the credit. Yes, the media-genic images and interactive energy has an appeal for a media savvy, web-focused generation that doesn’t just watch someone else’s tubes but wants to shape their own.
This combination of factors is described by James Deane from the BBC World Service Trust:
Human courage, self discipline and organisation multiplied by the communicative power of networks has equalled unprecedented and (for now and in the main) largely peaceful – political force. Networked social media (in this case principally Facebook) added to the narrative provided by independent television (in this case principally Al Jazeera and the BBC) has delivered decisively in favour of the citizenry.
In truth, social media will work best when it works with other channels. In Egypt, for example, there were an estimated 80,000 registered Twitter users, compared with 80 million mobile phone subscribers . Twitter may have played an important role amongst the protest leaders, and in engaging the outside world, but it should be placed in context. Social change isn’t a single-channel enterprise.
In truth, social media works best when it works with other channels.
This applies equally to using media as a tool for development. They may not grab the headlines, but changing attitudes and behaviours, working with communities to change long-standing social norms – these can be revolutions too, for the people involved. The divide between ‘new media thinking’ and ‘old media thinking’ should be a thing of the past – new media are likely to prove more effective when used in combination with other media .
Images from The Guardian, Hurriyet Daily News, and Hudson Horizons.
Filed under: Africa, BBC World Service Trust, Nike Foundation | Tags: Africa, BBC World Service Trust, Nike Foundation
It’s International Women’s Day today, and I wrote a piece for the BBC World Service Trust based on my trip to Ethiopia with Nike Foundation’s Girl Hub initiative.
The A-Z of sexual health in Ethiopia
An hour south of Ethiopia’s capital city, a group of teenagers huddles around a radio. They’re in a small, bright-green shack on the road to Addis Ababa, and they listen intently whilst the trucks trundle past outside. There’s a sense of conspiracy in the air. Nobody speaks until the programme finishes – and then a lively discussion breaks out.
It seems like a meeting of an underground youth movement, but it’s not. They’ve been listening to Abugida, a radio show broadcast weekly on Radio Ethiopia. Abugida means “A to Z”, and the programme covers a subject that remains taboo for many people in Ethiopia: sex.
A major issue
Sexual health is a major issue for young people in Ethiopia – despite decades of health campaigns. Rates of new HIV infections are starting to fall, but still as many as 8% of people are living with the disease in urban areas.
Teenage pregnancy is widespread: more than half of girls have had two babies by the age of 18.
“There’s so many misconceptions about sex in Ethiopia,” says Elsabet Samuel, producer of the Abugida show. “I recently met a girl who was beaten by her parents because she started menstruating. They thought it meant that she had started having sex.”
Let’s talk about it
“Conversations just don’t happen … mothers are too embarrassed to talk to their daughters, girls are shy, even friends don’t talk about it.”
The problem isn’t a lack of information – there are scores of sexual health campaigns aimed at young people in Ethiopia. The problem, according to Elsabet, is that people don’t talk about it. “Conversations just don’t happen” she says. “Mothers are too embarrassed to talk to their daughters, girls are shy, even friends don’t talk about it.”
As a result, an enormous amount of confusion and misinformation surrounds the subject. “People sometimes think that condoms are only for people who have HIV and AIDS,” says Elsabet, “or that taking the contraceptive pill makes you skinny.”
…and to be clear, skinny is a bad look in Ethiopia. To read the rest click here.
Filed under: Africa, BBC World Service Trust, Nike Foundation | Tags: Africa, BBC World Service Trust, Nike Foundation
Above is the view from the offices of the BBC World Service Trust in Addis Ababa. I’m on the board of advisors for the Trust, helping with their communications – so it was great to meet the team here in Ethiopia. They’re an example of how to get it right in Africa (more on this soon).
But where do we get it wrong? Everyone is always keen to shout about success, but getting-it-wrong is usually less visible. Here are some themes that have emerged from my conversations over the last ten days, here in Ethiopia:
- Campaigns look foreign
“They want to produce slick creative work”, people have told me. NGOs want communications that look good on their show-reel so they can attract continued funding and win awards. However, often NGO work looks foriegn to Ethiopians, especially in rural areas.
Campaigns are short-termist
“They want fast results for their own good, not for the good of the people”, said one person I spoke to. There’s a perception that NGOs are often only interested in fast results – thus there’s no long-term strategy. NGOs are driven by the need to report success, more than the need to create lasting change.
Communications are perjorative
Unintentionally, of course, but “they come across as saying ‘you’re wrong, your culture is bad’”. Most work is “based on foreign values” and therefore doesn’t connect with people, or even undermines them.
NGOs are patronizing
“They go in with the attitude that they know what’s best for you, and they’re going to tell you”. This an intrinsic problem: all behaviour change campaigns are de facto paternalistic – we need to acknowledge this to ourselves and find a way of dealing with it.
…and there’s one especially important theme, when it comes to making the Nike Foundation’s Girl Effect happen in Ethiopia:
- Campaigns for girls ignore context
There isn’t enough attention paid to the effect that girl-focused work can have on the rest of the family and the community. These stakeholders also need to change their attitudes and behaviours.
Communications people love collecting examples of things that work – but we don’t often spend so much time thinking about getting it wrong. When creating our own programs for Ethiopia, Rwanda and Nigeria, these are some of the things we should think about.
