Bill Foege in the hills near his boyhood home of Colville, Washington
Is Bill Foege.
This may sound like a personal opinion but it is, in fact, an informed, journalistic and observational if slightly gestalt statement of reality … insofar as I can tell.
I’ve covered global health as a journalist now for as long as it’s been a popular phrase and I would argue — with anyone, Bill Gates, Bono or Jimmy Carter if need be — that Bill Foege is probably the single most important person in global health.
The reason he has been so influential is the same reason so many people don’t seem to know who he is — or if you do know of him, how to pronounce his name.
It’s Fay-Ghee. Not Fogey. Or Foje.
You should know his name because he’s the guy who figured out the strategy that rid the world of smallpox — so far the only human disease ever eradicated. Foege is credited by Bill and Melinda Gates for helping craft their global health mission — a mission that now, arguably, sets the agenda for international health.
He was the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, appointed by President Jimmy Carter and stayed on for the first part of the Reagan Administration when the AIDS epidemic first emerged. His career in global health started half a century ago, when he and his wife Paula moved to Nigeria where he worked as a medical missionary.
The Science and Development Network news site has produced an excellent series of articles Innovation at the Grassroots examining how creative folks in the developing world are solving their own problems.
As SciDev.net editor David Dickson says in the introductory article:
Efforts to promote sustainable development must tap into technologies developed locally, driven by community needs and priorities.
The products of modern science and technology (S&T), from chemical pesticides to carbon-emitting combustion engines, are frequently blamed — with some justification — for the unsustainable use of the planet’s resources.
At the same time S&T offers a variety of tools for sustainable development — from forms of pest control that work with, rather than against, natural ecosystems, to cost-effective devices for producing renewable energy.
This creates a dilemma. We cannot reject technological tools in the quest for a sustainable future. But equally, without a radical transformation of how society defines and uses S&T, current patterns of growth and use of resources are unlikely to change.
I’m not a big fan of the word “innovation,” in that it has come to mean almost anything. But this series has a fairly focused definition and is making a good point — that all kinds of efforts in development, including innovation and invention, do best when they are nurtured from within the community rather than imported.
Cody Switzer at the Chronicle of Philanthropy reports on this funny video done by an aid worker fed up with how Hollywood — and many philanthropies — promotes harmful stereotypes of Africa and African men especially.
“We shoot our machine guns from trucks … We hate smiling. Smiling is stupid.”
Writes Switzer:
Nyla Rodgers is one charity official who is fed up with the way nonprofits represent Africa. Too often she sees depictions of AIDS, warfare, famine, hopelessness, desperation, and dependence on a Western hero. That kind of concern came to the surface when she saw the “Kony 2012” campaign by the advocacy group Invisible Children.
“When I saw the Kony campaign, it made me so mad,” says Ms. Rodgers, founding director of Mama Hope, a San Francisco charity that works in Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda to start farms and build schools, health centers, and other facilities that strengthen communities.
In a somewhat related vein, Laurie Lee, deputy director of external relations in Europe for the Gates Foundation writes on the philanthropy’s Impatient Optimists blog about how violence and political instability is actually on the decline in Africa:
A downward trend in violent conflict over the last decade on its own might be too early to cheer about. It has not been irreversible in every country. But combined with positive trends in the last decade on democracy, economic growth and improvements in health and education, we can feel more confident that the progress made in Africa at the start of the 21st Century will be sustained and will continue.
No, it is not some kind of festering boil in a section of the body you would prefer not be discussed. It’s actually another one of those UN agencies hardly anyone pays attention to, its full name the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.
Never mind all that. Just think of UNCTAD as an international meeting where you get to hear what the rest of the world really thinks of how the rich world has screwed up the global economy.
Alanna Shaikh
And then just read Alanna Shaikh’s daily musings from UNCTAD in Doha, Qatar, on her great blog Blood and Milk (listed in reverse chronological order). Alanna is a great writer, an aid/development expert and doesn’t mince words. Often hilarious. Even if you don’t care much about UNCTAD, her observations give you an idea of what it’s like to sit in on these development discussions.
Some excerpts:
Day Two: “Day two began with the Inter-Agency Cluster on Trade and Productive Capacity. This is an inter-agency meeting that only takes place at UNCTAD. Like so many inter-agency meetings, it consisted almost entirely of agency representatives reading prewritten statements and ignoring each other.”
You break it, you buy it: “UNCTAD delegates are calling for more government intervention into the economy, more taxation on investments, and more FDI, all at the same time. They want an explanation for what went wrong from the same hapless souls who steered us wrong in the first place. Do we really think suddenly everyone is smarter now?”
Day Four: “The first half of the high-level event on women in development depressed me. Heavy on platitudes and generalities, light on any real ideas. I also heard a lot of boring old tropes recycled – women don’t want to work outside the home, changing policy doesn’t help when culture is the problem.”
The conference goes until April 26 so Alanna’s got a few days left to go.
Given the fast-paced nature of news combined with our peculiarly American brand of cultural ADHD (attention-deficit-hyperisolationist-disorder), perhaps nobody should be too surprised that the call for actual action by the Kony 2012 campaign largely flopped.
That doesn’t mean the actual hunt in east-central Africa for the now world-infamous African warlord Joseph Kony isn’t on. Oh, it’s on.
But Friday was supposed to be a day of global call to action — in which the anti-Kony organization Invisible Children had called for people worldwide to put up posters and graffiti calling for the end to Kony’s reign of terror.
Didn’t really catch fire this time. Here are five possible explanations floating out there:
Slacktivism or Clicktivism — the modern tendency for people to “engage” in a social action that involves clicking on a web page but then doing nothing more.
Collapse of the heroic narrative. One thing the Kony 2012 bunch did amazingly well is create a ‘heroic narrative’ in which a bad guy is targeted by a good guy. But then the good guy, Invisible Children co-founder Jason Russell, confused people with weird behavior.
Apathy.
The counterpoint prevails. The Kony 2012 video exploded in popularity and just as quickly was attacked by many aid and development experts as a dangerous Hollywood-ization of a complex problem.
We cared then, but this is now. We’ve all just moved on to other things.
Here are some stories that examine the reported failure of the Cover the Night campaign, variously suggesting any or all of these reasons.
The Kony 2012 Cover the Night campaign woke up to awkward questions on Saturday after activists failed to blanket cities with posters of the wanted Ugandan warlord, Joseph Kony. The movement’s phenomenal success in mobilising young people online, following last month’s launch of a 29-minute documentary which went viral, flopped in trying to turn that into real world actions.
After a record breaking viral video and over 1400 likes on the local Facebook event page, the youth mobilized by the Kony 2012 campaign were supposed to come out in force to “Cover the Night”. They were to blanket Seattle, and the rest of the country, “demanding justice on every street corner” as the viral call-to-arms video proposed.
So did they? At least here in Seattle, the answer seems to be a resounding “kinda”….
Devin Erickson, a 20 year-old University of Washington (UW) sociology student and leader of the college’s KONY 2012 club, met with fellow club members Amethyst Williams, 18, and Alison Guajardo, 20, at UW’s Red Square before heading downtown to put up posters.
“[After the video went viral] we had 100 new members for our chapter but we have not seen any of them at the meetings,” Erickson said, referring to the difficulty of taking an online campaign offline.
Invisible Children claims otherwise, that thousands of photos they received indicate that their “Cover the Night” event was such a rousing success it “blew our minds.” Hmmm, not sure that’s the best phrase to use given co-founder Jason Russell’s bizarre reaction to their initial success with the video.
Thanks to Tom Murphy at A View from the Cave for pointing me to this excellent blog post at Integrating Development examining the idea of incorporating ‘happiness’ into international aid and development measures. Says Jen, the ‘semi-anonymous’ author and development expert based in Southeast Asia:
Those who hear of Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness (GNH) generally find it quaint. At best, the concept of happiness as a national goal seems whimsical, especially in an achingly beautiful, fairytale-like kingdom in the middle of nowhere (case in point: the header photo). But supporters of GNH are serious. Conceived as a backlash to the world’s obsession with GDP as a measure of a country’s worth, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck determined back in 1972 that happiness should be more important than income. After all, the King proclaimed, while the Bhutanese are poor, they are also very, very happy.
So read the entire thing, at the first link above. The author notes there are good reasons why happiness is being taking seriously — and also, not surprisingly, some serious questions about how best to measure it.
The very fact that serious-minded development experts, economists and political leaders are taking happiness seriously should make us all a bit happier.
Wouldn’t it be cool if instead of shuffling through a list of headlines or doing a search online to find a story about your organization’s work overseas in global health, poverty reduction or social justice you could just click on a map? Wouldn’t it be great if you could contact those living in the communities receiving aid to ask if it is actually helping make things better?
Yes, it would.
And that just happens to be what University of Washington geography and global health professor Matt Sparke has in mind.
Sparke, working with some of his highly intelligent students and colleagues (as well as the not-quite-so-intelligent-but-enthusiastic journalists here at Humanosphere), hopes to create an interactive online tool dubbed ChangeMap.
ChangeMap, in brief, will be an online interactive map published on Humanosphere but available to anyone interested in global health, aid, development and global justice to locate these initiatives. In addition, it will allow users to engage in dialogue with those working to make the world a better place — as well as those living in those places we seek to better.
