My top 10 communications stories in global health and poverty in 2012

Melinda Gates, Andrew Mitchell and three African heads of state welcome British Prime Minister David Cameron to the podium of the London Family Planning Summit.

This piece was originally published on the Impatient Optimists blog on Dec. 21, 2012.
 
In 2012, global development communication trends continued as in recent years: Non-profits increased their reliance on social media, decreased it on traditional media and looked for creative ways to call attention to their issues, change policy and raise money. Several global events provided unique opportunities to cast a spotlight on food security, family planning, and AIDS.

As a global development communicator, I track trends in development communication. For the last two years I have shared my personal, subjective take on what I consider the top global development communication stories of the year. Here’s my take on 2012, in no particular order:

In management of G8 and G20 summits, Mexican performance was vastly superior to U.S.

NGOs meeting at Los Cabos to prepare for their first press conference.

NOTE: This was originally published on the Huffington Post on July 2, 2012.
 
This year's G8 Summit took place at the secluded Camp David presidential retreat in the mountains of northern Maryland. The G20 Summit took place in Los Cabos, Mexico, the beach resort area at the southern tip of Baja California, where American tourists partied in clubs and frolicked on the beaches while 26 heads of state grappled with the world's most pressing problems.

Apart from the striking difference in venues, there was another huge contrast in the American and Mexican summits -- the level of transparency and the manner in which the two governments managed the process of consulting outside groups, including non-governmental organizations (NGOs), otherwise known as civil society. Guess which country had a very transparent and inclusive process, with multiple opportunities for civil society engagement, and which made used a dedicated website and a suite of social media tools, including Twitter, Facebook, You Tube and others, to share information.

If you guessed the United States, you'd be wrong. As a member of the G8/G20 Global Task Force, a group of international NGOs advocating for their issues in the two summits, I saw firsthand that the Obama Administration's management of the G8 process was none of that:

In advancing food security at G20, civil society can learn from business

NOTE: This was originally published on the Impatient Optimists of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on June 20, 2012.
 
LOS CABOS, Mexico — One of the remarkable developments of this G20 Summit is the meteoric rise of the B20 (Business-20) and its championing of an issue that is also a priority for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) — food security and nutrition.

The B20 describes itself as “an international forum aimed at fostering dialogue between G20 governments and the global business community,” with a main objective of providing heads of state with meaningful recommendations from business.

Food security and nutrition might not have achieved the prominence they have at this summit if not for the B20. And they have achieved prominence—if not many concrete results — as evidenced by Mexican President Felipe Calderón’s op-ed in the Financial Times Monday entitled “Why food security comes first:”

We will have failed if we manage to get the richest nations back on track while the poorest still experience famine. That is why my country insisted on placing food security at the top of the G20 agenda, alongside the restoration of economic growth and global financial reform.

What NGOs want from the Mexico G20 on food security and nutrition

NGOs holding one of our two press conferences at the G20 at Los Cabos.

NOTE: This was originally published on the Huffington Post on June 18, 2012.
 
LOS CABOS, Mexico -- On the eve of the G20 Summit, which opens here on June 18, I've been looking into what nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) want to get out of the G20 Mexico on an issue that is a priority to NGOs as well as the Mexican presidency of the G20 -- "enhancing food security and addressing commodity price volatility," in the words of the Mexican government.

And I discovered that the biggest NGOs and NGO coalitions here in Los Cabos are advocating for many of the same food security and nutrition issues, but also have some differences.

In its paper titled Food Security: A G20 Priority, the Mexican government defines food security "not only as an increase in production, but also the availability of, and access to, food by the population."

In a sense, that is one of the highest priorities of NGOs advocating on this issue at Los Cabos -- to ensure that the G20 not only takes steps to increase food production but also to make sure that the most vulnerable, especially women and children, have access to it.

My take on the G8/G20 summits in Toronto

TORONTO, Canada — It’s been a raucous and, in some ways, surprising three days here at the overlapping G8 and G20 Canadian summits. I was struck by four issues that emerged at the summits — logistics, media access, NGO reaction and media interest in maternal and child health

First, there have never been two summits at the same time in the same country. The G8 ran Friday and Saturday in a remote area two hours north of here by road called Muskoka, in the town of Huntsville. Because of the limited facilities there, very few journalists (and no NGO representative that I know of) had access and those few that did had to be up at 3:00 am to go through security and catch the bus in Toronto for the long trip north to Huntsville. Reporters on these buses did one of two things — sleep and work on their laptops and cell phones — and so the only sound in the buses was the clacking of keys on electronic devices. And the G20 was Saturday and Sunday in Toronto, but the leaders were still separated from the media and NGOs, albeit by one mile instead of 200.

Second, the issue of media access to NGOs has been a big issue for the NGOs throughout the summits and continues to be. At recent summits, including both of those last year in Italy and Pittsburgh, NGOs, for the most part, had full access to the international media. This worked to the advantage of both parties and ensured that journalists had just as much access to civil society as they did to governmental delegations who, understandably, want to spin things in their favor (as does civil society).

For some reason which no one understands, the Canadian government thought this was a bad idea and decided to put the NGOs in an “Alternative Media Center” and segregate the two groups in separate buildings across the street from each other. The difference is that the one for the media is surrounded by a high fence and concrete barriers and NGOs are not allowed in without an invitation from someone with proper media credentials. Most of us in civil society have not been invited across the street, and few reporters leave the comfort of their media center to come to us.

The Global Health Council was one of 12 non-governmental organizations that put out a statement critical of the Canadian government for this “media apartheid” which produced an article in Saturday's Toronto Star.

But another aspect of media and civil society access was less commented upon. At the 2009 G8 in L’Aquila, Italy, we all — journalists and NGOs — had access to the heads of state and the country delegations. That is, we were all in the same facility, inside the same perimeter. Because of that, I was able to attend a press conference with President Obama, Prime Minister Harper and other G8 leaders without going through security again. That was not the case in Pittsburgh. And here in Toronto, even most of the mainstream media does not have access to the heads of state, who are in the Toronto Convention Center a mile away from here. In a press briefing this morning by South Korea, the host of the next G20 in November, we were told that Seoul will revert to the L’Aquila model, where we are all together in the same location.

Third, it was interesting to see the different reactions in the NGO community to the announcement of the $7.3 billion, five-year Muskoka Initiative on maternal, newborn, child and reproductive health championed by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Even though this is a huge win for global health advocates, given the relative attention that global health attracted at the 2009 summits, the NGO reaction was somewhat, though not uniformly, negative. Generally, the pure advocacy organizations (like the ONE Campaign) and the large implementing organizations that work in many areas of development (like Save the Children and Oxfam) were negative. But the organizations which focus on health,like the Global Health Council and the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, both organizations representing hundreds of other organizations, were much more upbeat about the Muskoka Initiative. As was the African Medical and Relief Foundation (AMREF), the only indigenous African health organization present in Toronto

The Washington Post, one of the few U.S. mainstream media outlets to give this story any legs, published a story entitled “Aid group slams lack of financial support for maternal and child health initiative.” based on quotes only from Save the Children and Oxfam, two of the NGOs that did get into the media center. Other organizations, with more positive perspectives, were not interviewed because they were not in the media center to be interviewed. The Post later published my letter expressing my concerns about that situation.

In this case, it appears that the Canadian government strategy backfired as they might have gotten a better story out on their flagship G8 initiative if they had allowed full access between media and NGOs.

Finally, the Muskoka Initiative on maternal and child health got very good media coverage in Canada (it was front page news on the front of The Globe and Mail, Canada’s premier newspaper, on Saturday, and it was surprisingly prominent in the Canadian TV coverage that I saw). People on the street knew about it; my taxi driver on Saturday night, originally from Bangladesh, told me it was the best story coming out of the G8 and would improve a lot of lives.

I understand why this initiative was a big story in Canada since it is a Canadian initiative and the summits are taking place in Canada. But I wish that the U.S. media had paid more attention to what may be the only truly positive story coming out of the summits. And I wish the NGO community had been more welcoming of what is a highly positive development and a step — if not a leap — in the right direction.

Stephen Harper said something in his press conference on Friday night about the Muskoka Initiative that I liked so much I put it in our G8 press release: "Of all things we could spend our money on, who wouldn't want to spend to save the life of a mother who would otherwise die?"

NGOs feeling mixed as Canadian summits open

TORONTO, Canada — As world leaders arrive in Canada for the twin G8 and G20 summits, we, in the NGO community who advocate for global health, have decidedly mixed feelings about the annual gatherings of world leaders.

On the one hand, we are excited that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is pushing for a $1 billion Canadian initiative on maternal, newborn and child health (MNCH), a surprising development when it was announced in January since Harper is not known as a champion of international development, and since MNCH was almost completely ignored at the 2009 G8 in Italy and G20 in Pittsburgh. We are grateful to our colleagues in Canadian civil society for their efforts in making that happen.

At the same, NGOs are profoundly disappointed with the tone the same Canadian government has set by barring NGOs and civil society from the international media center for the first time in recent history. In both L’Aquila, Italy and Pittsburgh last year, NGOs and media shared the same media center in a way that was mutually beneficial for both parties.

We don’t understand why the Canadian government felt it necessary to segregate the NGOS in separate facilities. The International Media Center — the “real” media center — is across the street from the “Alternative” Media Center (where the NGOs are congregated and from where I write this) but the “real” center is surrounded by a wire fence and concrete barriers, apparently to impede aggressive NGO representatives, who have to be invited in by journalists.

The Harper government seems to be going in a different direction from the United Nations, which last week opened its process leading to September’s summit on the Millennium Development Goals to civil society and the private sector for the first time, with informal and interactive hearings to get various perspectives on how to accelerate progress towards achieving the MDGs.

Interaction, the coalition of U.S. NGOs with which Global Health Council shares reciprocal membership), felt so strongly about this adverse development that they decided not to send anyone to Toronto, even though it normally coordinates the U.S. civil society presence at these summits. Yesterday, Interaction issued a statement critical of this lack of access, which makes it more difficult to achieve a “transparent monitoring system” that is needed to evaluate if donor countries actually honor their commitments.

U.S. President Barack Obama just arrived at Toronto airport, the last G8 leader to arrive, and is helicoptering to Muskoka, the remote resort area north of here, for the beginning of the G8 Summit. The G20 Summit starts here in Toronto tomorrow.

For great background information and useful links on the G8 and G20 summits, go to the Council's special G8G20 webpage.

G20 proves frustrating but Pittsburghers a delight

PITTSBURGH -- I just spent two days at the G20 Summit here trying to keep global health on the leaders' agenda, as it had been in Washington in November 2008 when they pledged to work on achieving the Millennium Development Goals. But it was completely absent from their agenda in Pittsburgh. This was a disappointment, but the incredible graciousness of Pittsburghers helped make up for it. A few examples:

The night before the opening of the summit, I was having a drink with a friend at a bar across the street from Pirates Stadium where the Pirates were playing the Reds. I would have like to have gone but we were headed for a party in a couple of hours. Imagine my delight when a man came by and dropped two free tickets on us. Five minutes later we were inside the stadium with a very sparse crowd (people were not coming downtown because of the G20) on a beautiful September evening sitting in very good seats!

We had to leave early to attend a party hosted by Teresa Heinz Kerry to raise support for the fight against global warming at the Andy Warhol Museum which, by the way is fantastic. There was great New Orleans music - Cajun, rock and jazz -- and great food and drink. Not to mention the art of Andy Warhol. When we were leaving about midnight, we could not find a taxi and when we called were told that one could not come in less than 45 minutes. A lovely couple overheard us and offered us a ride to our hotel -- even though it was in the opposite direction from their house!

And on the last day of the summit, two Save the Children colleagues and I were walking to the media center through downtown Pittsburgh with a very high level of security. Even though it was Friday, very few places were open. But when we spotted a coffee shop with the catchy name of "Crazy Mocha" we had to stop. When we walked into the shop, the two employees cheered and applauded us. They were so bored from the lack of customers, that they had to express their joy at seeing us!

Pittsburgh is a far more interesting city than I every imagined populated by warm, wonderful and quirky people and I would go back anytime. A very underated and very American city! I highly recommend it.