Sales of curved yellow fruit have dropped significantly in Mozambique following the circulation of a rumor that bananas were infecting people with necrotising fasciitis — a skin-eating disease.
“From the work conducted by the Ministries of Agriculture, Health and Trade and Industry, it was concluded that there is no record of entry of any infected banana in the country,” said the country’s health minister in a statement.
The rumor, which spread virally via email and text, specifically warned consumers to avoid bananas from the neighbouring South African province of KwaZulu-Natal. The decline in bananas sales surprised the government, as Mozambique doesn’t import bananas from South Africa.
The agriculture ministry in South Africa was forced to release a similar statement countering claims made by the hoax email — particularly the part about burning skin surrounding a suspected area of infection.
The growing community of bloggers in Madagascar is using the Kenyan web interface Ushahidi to report from the ground about the current Malagasy power struggle. Using SMS text messaging and online mapping tool Google Maps, bloggers are capturing witness accounts of social unrest, giving the global blogosphere an insight into life on the island, that is not all the Disney movie makes out.
Bloggers who started the Foko Blog Club (several bloggers around the country have been trained) are behind the new Foko alert system, which aims to empower ordinary Malagasy people who are increasingly growing to distrust the mainstream media. These citizens can now upload reports of unrest around the country and have them added immediately to an online map.
But what does this easily accessible new media technology mean for journalism?
Kenyan elections
The alert system is powered by Ushahidi (meaning ‘testimony’- in Swahili), which was used to map in real-time results of the Kenyan presidential election. It allowed for a bottom-up citizen spotlight on riots and violence that could be done easily from a mobile phone especially when cyber cafes were under surveillance.
It meant Kenyans did not have to rely on the foreign media for their own news and information could be disseminated in the many unofficial dialects spoken in Kenya. Blogging was intended to ease tension and promote peaceful resolutions in the election aftermath and content was not motivated by the need to supply sensational stories to an editor.
Potentially dangerous
However, this highly accessible form of citizen journalism also showed its sinister side. Text messages were used to threaten and intimidate journalists. Inboxes were infiltrated with messages that fanned ethic hatred and violence between the Kalenjin and Kikuyu tribes that echoed dissemination in Rwanda that was ultimately a catalyst for the genocide.
Citizen journalism
Ushahidi has provided a fantastic participatory media tool, but the events in Kenya are a warning sign of the undermining possibilities.
Does the title ‘citizen journalism’ actually deserve the latter word? The use of online media opens the back door to unethical and unprofessional content. How does the Malagasy system propose to moderate alerts?
Working behind the scenes is blogger Tahina Rak told Global Voices Online that Ushahidi is “a kind of platform where everybody is invited to submit reports. The main objective is to find real facts, and to distinguish rumours from truth.”
The hub through which the SMS messages pass is monitored. A team of bloggers check reports for accuracy, but only after they have been posted. In the case of an influx of a high frequency messages, say when a major event occurs, some reports could run the risk of going unchecked. Is there a proper code set out for moderation? Moderation and amendments at one’s own discretion could simply be classed as censoring. This new media is also at risk of being hijacked with ‘planned’ messages all at once.
Tahina said:
[W]e have bloggers on the ground and will be counting on them. But we will also use all media – newspapers, television and radio to help verify. We also have Twitter now, where we can compare and contrast information. We won’t verify reports unless we are sure of them.
Technical challenges
Foko Ushahidi has faced technical challenges.
Phones that are compatible with Ushahidi’s Front Line SMS software are not easy to find in Madagascar. SMS is important because it does not require internet connection.
Many mobile phone stores were closed during the unrest.
Slow internet connections mean it can take up to 15 minutes to reach the Udahishi platform.
I feel we must be wary of the role these technologies play in journalism, especially when there is inter-conflict or government tension involved. They could become a tool to rock the political boat for people who want to legitimise their own causes. But then cyber-activism is another role altogether that has an important part to play in democratic governance.
Ushahidi is a great platform for an island like Madagascar where environmental disasters and cyclones are recurrences that would not see the light of day in the mainstream headlines because of their unsexy and frequent nature. There are also great possibilities when used alongside networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook, providing there is appropriate moderation.
In the midst of the civil war between the Sri Lankan army and the LTTE, Channel 4 News reporter, Nick Paton Walsh was yesterday told by Sri Lanka’s Defence Secretary, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, that he would be deported, as a result of the a piece that was run on Tuesday concerning the internally displaced person (IDP) camps in Vavuniya.
Tuesday’s report carried allegations that dead bodies were being left in camps, children were separated from their parents and even seriously, women were being humiliated by having to bathe in public and also being sexually abused supposedly by Sri Lankan soldiers, according to aid workers.
So why has this not been picked up by the Sri Lankan media? A number of factors could be involved. The most obvious is government censorship – the media has to be guided by the army in IDP camps. Channel 4 managed to get cameras into certain zones of the camps and produced the first independent pictures of them.
The second concerns self-censorship. As well as gaining access, a Sri Lankan journalist would face the ethical dilemma of whether to fulfill his or her truth-telling duties – will it do more harm than good? Will I be preventing aid coming to the country? Or more simply, will I be putting myself in life-threatening danger? A relativist ethical approach of printing “all the truth that is fit to print” is discussed in Who is a development journalist?.
Nick Paton Walsh: Asia correspondent, Channel 4 News
The report will now also be open to scrutiny from people who question the credibility of the aid worker sources and those who feel it has undermined access to camps for any other Western journalists now.
Paton Walsh said the Sri Lankan government are sensitive, as they are partly looking to the international community, including the UN, to step-in. Rajapaska told him that Channel 4’s reports of the IDP camps “damaged the image of Sri Lanka”. In his blog today, he said:
“There is a reason why the government is so extraordinarily sensitive about this topic, bar the usual protectiveness of a nation for its armed forces. They need western money to fund these IDP camps – places government officials openly accept are “technically” internment camps. They will hold part of the country’s ethnic Tamil population for as long as three years, many involved say.
The government has spent a lot on the war and needs the UN to fund and manage this “resettlement” project – ostensibly the detention of up to 230,000 people for long enough to filter out any remaining militant sympathisers…
But there is a broader reason why deportation, not rapid rebuttal, was the chosen method in dealing with our allegations. The government is intolerant of a critical press. Journalists get killed – most notoriously Lasantha Wickrematunge – an editor assassinated in January.”
Now the UN has called for need to protect women and children in the camps to make them safer.
IDP Camp in Vavuniya about 160 miles north of Columbo, Sri Lanka
Hollywood actor Mia Farrow is now in the tenth day of her hunger strike in protest for the refugees of Darfur, whose lives have been put at risk by the Sudanese government through Omar al-Bashir’s expulsion of aid agencies from the region, including Oxfam UK and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).
Hunger strikes aren’t a new form of protest against government regimes and have been employed by Mahatma Gandhi to the suffragettes.
But to what extent will Farrow’s efforts along with celebrity status help in raising awareness for the humanitarian crisis in Darfur?
So far, 75 people have signed up on her website Mia Farrow.org to join her fast. An ambassador for Unicef, she has been a high profile activist for Darfur since 2005.
Scepticism is inevitable.
Khaled al-Mubarak at the Sudanese embassy in London told the Guardian: “She is a good actress and a good human being, but as a politician she is only a beginner. She is like George Clooney, who has also got involved in the Darfur question. He is good looking but ignorant. She is ignorant too.”
Picture: miafarrow.org
Indeed, Farrow herself is also aware that her attempts may be in vain. She told reporters before she began:
“I’m not presuming anybody will care whether I starve to death or whether I go on a long hunger strike or what. But it’s a personal matter.”
With the now ubiquitous role of of the western celebrity ever more frequent in aid, their efficacy and even motives are under scrutiny… Whose profile are they trying to raise – the country in crisis or their own? Their faces are icons of modernisation – why not get global recognition with a deep and meaningful reality check thrown in.. adopt a cute black kid while at it?
In a London conference in February, Professor John Street, who dubs it ‘charitainment’, quoted the Washington Post, which seriously reported in coverage of Angelina Jolie in Darfur that she was ‘monitoring the crisis’ there.
The western media has to put its hands up when it comes to covering development issues from a charitainment angle. Journalist, Ann McFerran said in London that whilst getting “privileged access” to celebrities, she is better equipped to get an unsexy issue such as infant mortality in Sierra Leone into the press if David Beckham was on board.
Of course you’ll raise your profile as a celeb getting involved in aid, but what harm can that do if it is getting an issue in the mainstream media? Is ‘branding’ today’s NGO the way forward?
MSF’s Kris Torgeson said the water crisis in Angola would “never have got half an hour on MTV” if it wern’t for rapper Jay-Z involved.
But, Zambian economist and author of the controversial Dead Aid, Dambisa Moyo, says it’s all ‘glamour aid’:
“Long, long lines of people [in Africa] have stood in the sun to vote for a president who is effectively impotent because of donors or because glamour aid has decided to speak on behalf of a continent.
How would British people feel if tomorrow Michael Jackson started telling them how they should get out of the housing crisis?”
Here she speaks at the Carnegie Council:
The stark contrast of a pampered celebrity stood in a sea of black faces paints a dire picture of Africa. Moyo says there should me more emphasis on the positive.
The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative was geared at children in “developing countries” when it was introduced in 2005 as the $100 Laptop. Its key design features were that it required little power and was enclosed to prevent water, sand or dirt damage also giving it a toy-like feel so not to appear too intimidating to a child who has never come across a computer before.
It has made us question what place technology has in global development efforts. Four years on, environmental historian Benjamin Cohen points out some of the ‘snags’ of the $100 laptop, which include:
Issues with actual cost (the $100 laptop is no longer called that, because it costs $200?)
Political and governmental resistance from countries to whom OLPC seeks to send the laptops. (In two cases, Nigeria and Brazil had been seeking local laptops, not imported, but other countries have presented other kinds of resistance.)
Businesses, such as Intel, who would like to make their own inexpensive laptop (the Intel classmate)
Grumblings from consumers of wealthy nations (“we want a cheap laptop too!”)
Education (what value are laptops when you don’t have pencils? or a teacher?)
Countries who have ordered in volume have experienced some measure of delays getting the devices.
But India placed an order this week for 250,000 of the OLPC machines for distribution to around 1,500 schools – a U-turn decision after the Indian government publicly rejected it OLPC as “paedagogically suspect” back in 2006, when the Education Secretary, Sudeep Banerjee, wrote:
“We cannot visualize a situation for decades when we can go beyond the pilot stage. We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools.”
Is this a move that reinforces the notion that India is at the forefront of the globalisation process? Either way it will give the boost that OLPC needs, who has lost key members through resignation and been forced to cut staff.
The online world is fast becoming a platform for cyber activism – but can you make a difference in just 140 characters?
My last post looked at NGOs using Twitter. During the last week, the social networking site became the latest tool to raise awareness for malaria, when American actor, Ashton Kutcher, challenged the CNN network to a race to be the first to get a million followers, where the winner would donate mosquito bednets in awareness of the near approaching World Malaria Day on 25th April.
Kutcher had been posting about malaria on his Twitter feed in the run up to the race which he narrowly won.
“I just think its amazing that 1 voice can now be as powerful at an entire media network. thank you twitter!” (7:06 PM Apr 13thfrom web)
But this is the guy also Tweets about his wife’s behind.
The point Kutcher was trying to make, was that the power of social networking like Twitter can potentially make you as influencial as an entire media network…if you’re a high profile celebrity that is.
What was actually achieved? It wasn’t each follower that paid for the bednets, and how many of his followers actually clicked on any of the preachy malaria website links he Tweeted?
The Malaria Policy Centre thanked his efforts, but one blogger accused Kutcher for using Twitter to massage his ego.
“What you did succeed in doing is placing the focus on the wrong aspect of Twitter. Now every celeb would think ‘hey I’m more popular than Ashton, I could totally go beyond 1M.’ You’ll be lying if you say you’ll be reading each and every post from your 1M followers — just not physically possible.
Twitter’s value to me has always been the information shared from each contact. What you did succeed in doing is putting old media Hollywood thinking into Twitter, ie the bigger the audience you have, the better.”
Sure, social networking is an important media tool for development that cannot be ignored – but through the front of a celebrity it makes it very difficult to measure its realistic impact.
But now even NGOs and charities have flown into the ‘tweeting’ nest in a bid to share videos, stories and blogs – and as a way to keep their supporters up to date on the development work they do.
Some people are still wary and critical of this method of communication, with fears that it will totally replace a more conventional method of reporting.
And as a nonprofit communicator, I fear that Twitter undermines everything I try to do: Use words. Tell stories. Talk about people… I imagine Oxfam writers coming back from the field in the not too distant future.
To get the word out, we’d tweet about our experiences, crafting bits of tiny shorthand to share with followers. They’d then re-tweet, passing things on, sure, but not really connecting anyone to the heart of our story–the people and organizations we work with on the ground. With space for only 140 characters, I wonder: Where do those voices fit in?
Impersonal?
I understand Kramer’s point. Twitter produces media that is devoid of the ‘human face’ factor and you cannot simplify a humantiarian crisis in 140-characters. But it does give NGOs a human voice that followers can engage and interact with – not forgetting applications like twitpic that can accompany tweets.
It can get over-personal however, as the tweeter’s personal views cannot cloud the NGO’s micro-blogging goal. It also gives them the real-time opportunity to be more transparent in the work they do. What they must not do is use it as a platform to advertise themselves per se.
New audience
Twitter gets the information across without emphasising the element of poverty voyeurism to which people have grown so accustomed, and gradually becoming immune.
NGOs can also open up to audiences always on the move whose concentration spans can only cope with 140-characters and it can help with the branding of an NGO who needs to get a real feel for their audience and who is missing from it. People choose to follow you on Twitter so it’s also not so passive.
If NGOs use the right techniques they can effectively utilise this cost-effective media tool to expand their donor base and maintain awareness over a longer period of time than you would get with a 2-minute television ad. And then there are celebrities, with whom Twitter is a big hit – if you get them retweeting your updates, you have the potential of a massive audience.
Take a look for yourself at at how these organisations are using Twitter:
Learning About Living (LAL) is a new media project in Nigerian schools helping young people to combat ignorance on issues around sexual health, HIV and AIDS, maternal morbidity and gender violence, based on the Nigerian Family Life and HIV/AIDS Education (FLHE) curriculum. It has been running for over two years now.
Funding for the Learning about Living pilot is mainly from the West: Oxfam Novib, Netherlands, MacArthur Foundation USA, Butterfly Works and Finalist IT Group, Netherlands so there is likely to be an element of Western influence over the content of the software (which is made to be compatible with Intel classmate laptops and also the One Laptop per Child device.
The idea behind it is that young characters on the computer screen become the ‘peer educators’ in classrooms that you then discuss in class exercises.
Sensitive topics
One of the main reasons such a learning tool is needed in Nigerian schools is because young people and parents find it difficult to talk about sexual topics openly in Nigerian culture. This could potentially lead to generations of miseducation regarding sexually transmitted infections.
Professor Bene Madunago of the Girls’ Power Initiative (GPI) which is also in collaboration with LAL said that even teachers themselves were not comfortable with talking about subjects such as HIV/AIDs.
The programme follows Nigerian culture and it initiates discussions about sex, but it is important that it only accompanies teaching rather than replaces it, as not talking about sexual relationships face-to-face may become the norm and could be a dangerous thing if health education on sensitive subjects was solely dependent on computers that replace human contact.
Limitations
It is a largely decontralised approach that can seem less orderly to an authoritarian-style teacher for example. so they have to adapt as well as the students.
The problem with these programmes is that student assessment and feedback can be fairly limited and bandwidth limitations mean you cannot necessarily develop them any further.
Apart from a short quiz after every section of information, there is not actually a way of monitoring whether students are taking any of the information in.
I went through one of the lessons online on HIV and AIDs. In effect it did feel like I was reading a health leaflet but with some colourful images accompanied, but information was very simple and clear. It also promotes abstinence which can be dangerous if ‘fidelity’ is the only thing you’re relying on for STI prevention, however it does offer advice for young people who don’t choose abstinence.
The interactive test is interesting as it explores the myths surrounding HIV as well as the facts – have a go here.
On the whole it also allows teenagers to ask questions online, discretly which they would never have done out loud in the classroom. The online service has had a good response indicating the need for it. Perhaps there is a need for more consultation with young people and parents to establish their information needs.
Sustainability is an important issue in international development journalism and one which has been the issue of sceptics of the Guardian’s Katine project. Freelance journalist Eliza Anyangwe questioned whether, despite, being exciting and able to make a difference, a short-term project like this £2.5m initiative is actually a good idea…
“That per capita investment would produce higher agricultural yields, better healthcare, more enrolments in school and better rural governance anywhere in the world. But what happens in the years after the project? Who will be able to afford the high-yield seeds and who will provide books for schools or train teachers? What becomes of the villagers of Katine then?
It makes me wonder if Katine is an example of recklessness or a good project that shares a universal characteristic with other development projects: they tend to leave a bitter aftertaste.”
She suggests “short-sightedness” in development means that issues, such as education and health, will not get the long-term attention they require. She also raised concerns that those trained by the project will move to the Uganda capital, Kampala.
One of my previous posts looked at some of the problems the Guardian faced, especially in working with NGO Amref. Based on that, anything more than three years would seem quite challenging. Project Katine must build foundations that won’t crumble once the project is over.
It depends whether you think you’re being negative when criticising the project. Once the three-years are over you can fear that the “positive results of these projects will soon erode” or can think that some changes are inevitable in a region like Katine, and the positive has not eroded – but is just evolving to suit the needs of that area. The end of the project doesn’t necessarily mean fail.
But Katine may have helped to change attitudes, but without the funding, Anyangwe does have a point.
Development and health campaigns always face the challenge of firstly, getting their message out to target audiences, and then sustaining that message. But what if there was a method where you could educate people indirectly?
Makutano Junction is a Kenyan-produced soap also shown in Uganda and Tanzania featuring a fictional village. Every episode, broadcast in English, is watched by around seven million Kenyans, of which 50% of television owners live in rural areas.
Described as “stories that touch your heart and maybe teach you something new” DFID say “hard hitting and realistic storylines” are what makes them have the success and popularity of British soaps like Eastenders and Coronation Street from even the remotest of villages.
Storylines educate on topics including contraception, challenging corruption, malaria prevention through bednets, HIV and AIDS and giving women a voice in politics.
The soaps aim to kick off local conversation about some of the most serious health and development challenges that face the Global South.
In India, the series Jasoos Vijay aims to prevent AIDS and also change attitudes on the virus and HIV. Watched by 70 million Indians, figures show the mass audiences DFID have access to. There have also been moves to go beyond English and Hindi speakers, and the show is broadcast in Hindi and seven other regional languages. Throughout the fictional storylines are small intermissions, where experts give information on HIV prevention. It is vital as 5 million Indians are infected with HIV and AIDS and the social stigma of infection remains a factor in its spreading.
Bollywood
But Bollywood churns out more films than America, that are often based in imperialist ideals, where there are echos of Ritzer’s ‘Mcdonaldisation’ paradigm a lot of glamour involved in the clothes, music, houses and storylines – some of which are not relevant to audiences besides escapism and entertainment. It does make you wonder whether Bollywood should play an increasing role in ‘edutainment’.
Makutano Junction
Soap operas on the radio reach an even bigger audience than on the television. The Story Story radio programme is set in a Nigerian Marketplace and is recorded on location. Broadcast in English on 57 federal, state and independent partner stations as well as on the BBC World Service, which has also delivered extensive radio training to professionals in Nigeria. Versions have also been produced in the Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba languages.
South Africa’s TV soap Soul City regularly reaches 16m people and has been running for over 15 years. It was originally set up by NGOs in 1994, but regular test screenings by producers to ensure they are real and relevant storylines to the audiences watching, where HIV prevention messages are central to its storylines.
It has been so successful that they are introducing a transition in to Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and Zimbabwe and encompassing radio shows, information booklets and a spin-off show for young children (Soul Buddyz). One episode which focused on domestic abuse brought in 180,000 calls to a women’s helpline while the programme was on air.
Makutano Junction offers weekly comic leaflets
‘Gritty’
Matthew Krouse, arts editor of the Johannesburg Mail & Guardian, has been following Soul City since the beginning and praises it for steering away from Western television exported to South Africa, despite being sceptical at first:
“We’re saturated with crap American TV at the moment, this never-never land of beautiful people and unrealistic lives. But here we have a gritty, realistic soap with a powerful message. It’s something we can really be proud of.”
These soaps are fairly sanctimonious and preachy and don’t necessarily offer a means to put this new thinking into practice. There is the danger that the messages are so indirect that they just blend into the notion of entertainment. Viewers and listeners are also very passive, so it does echo a top-down model.
There is still the problem that these messages cannot reach those who cannot afford to purchase television sets or radios.
However entertainment is an important strategy for development and it does seem practical for regions that have an aural tradition.
MSF’s Kris Torgeson said the water crisis in Angola would “never have got half an hour on MTV” if it wern’t for rapper 
The 
We have seen the great potential of real-time micro-blogging – for example a student journalist 
the ground floor 