Communication/Media Platform

Ranjan Shrestha of SNV (Netherlands Development Organization) in Rwanda will facilitate communication between smallholder coffee producers and district coffee taskforces to boost the coffee sector in Rwanda. District coffee taskforces composed of public, private, and non-profit members meet quarterly to discuss current issues, including production and market access, and to develop action plans. Coffee producers are largely excluded from these proceedings due to communication barriers.

Meredith Blake of the ProSocial LLC in the U.S. will recruit a team of television writers, entertainment advisors, and foreign aid experts to develop a network television series that tells the story of aid workers around the world. The series would be the anchor for a public education campaign focusing on the relevance of international aid and its demonstrated record of success.

Jeff Snell of Marquette University in the U.S. will work with writers David Bornstein (How to Change the World) and Tina Rosenberg (Pulitzer prize-winning The Haunted Land) to create an interactive digital platform that features case studies focused on successful solutions and innovations that address major social issues (specifically the "Fixes" column in the New York Times). The site will include curriculum plans based on those solutions that can be uploaded and shared by educators.

Jack McPartland of Future Buro in Australia will work to turn the figure "0.7%" - which is the United Nations target for aid donations from the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of developed countries - into a brand that can be communicated to tell the story about the proportionally small amount of financial resources needed to make an impact in the developing world.

Robin McQueen of the Truman National Security Institute in the U.S. will work to reframe the concept of foreign aid as effective and essential to national security. A short film trailer will be produced featuring trusted voices of military veterans to explain how aid mitigates crises that can cause global instability. The trailer will be presented with innovative methods of visual and mobile communications to prompt viewers to link to a website for more information. Viewer demographics will be tracked to target groups for further education campaigns.

Anne Donohue, Jennifer Beard, and colleagues at Boston University in the U.S. will create and pilot a newsroom staffed by students from the U.S. and Kenya who will receive training in global health issues and journalism. These students will create news stories focusing on successful aid projects, and those judged to have the best news content and dissemination strategies will travel into the field to complete their productions and work on placement of their stories in mainstream media outlets.

Kathryn Kahler Vose of GALEWill Design in the U.S. will create new, simpler messages about the impact of aid that will help the global development community tell compelling stories about their work. These new messages will be disseminated to aid workers via a digital tool to help them translate the complicated language of foreign aid into terms the general public can relate to and understand.

Mark Bashore and his team from Digital Kitchen in the U.S. will create a worldwide radio channel for children aged 8 to provide knowledge, insights and perspectives on aid, and promote connections between the developing and the developed world. By focusing their approach on the young population, they hope in time to transform the "have and have not" concept of aid. The channel will broadcast aid-related first person stories, music, and cultural exchanges. Radio remains the dominant media in the developing world, and radios are cheap and durable.

Caroline Diehl of Media Trust in the United Kingdom and her team will combine its existing television channel with media partnerships and creative young people to produce the first television, online and mobile channel run by young people to disseminate stories on development. A pilot model has been locally tested using established infrastructure and partnerships.

Arjun Venkatraman of Environics Trust in India and colleagues will use an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system to collect 10,000 personal narratives of the impact of aid programs in rural India. The system will be developed to record a brief audio phone message from low-literate citizens who have benefited from the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which guarantees employment to any citizen who seeks it. They will train a team of moderators to solicit contributors, who will receive a nominal fee, and to review and cross-check contributions.