8Millennium News

Millennium News | A series of eight television breaking news on the Millennium Development Goals, written and filmed by the former street boys and girls from Nairobi

Millennium News is the title of a series of te-levision news programmes, written, narrated and filmed by a group of former street boys

and girls from Nairobi’s slums, each dedicated to the eight famous Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s), promoted by the United Nations with the aim of defea-ting poverty within 2020.The highlight of the international cooperation politics, often mentioned by world media but mostly unknown to the public, the eight MDG’s will offer the group of young videographers and journalists several opportunities: to show, through their personal thinking and own langua-ge, a number of possible and simple solutions; to bring up their life’s issues such as poverty, hunger, lack of edu-cation, discrimination; to understand how such MDGs are perceived within the slums, through the characters and the stories of their environment.

Each news will be ironically inspired by the ones of main-stream media; it will have its proper acronym, a studio will be set inside the slum, two elegant and facetious anchormen will be on camera, and they will introduce original and exclusive reportages by explaining the con-tent and the meaning of the United Nations’ goals. Here are some examples, already proposed by the group of youngsters during a previous survey.Goal number one - Defeat extreme poverty and hunger – will, for instance, tell the story of an employer who, every month, checks that his employees use their salaries to reduce poverty in their families and not use them to get drunk.Goal number two– Make sure that all children have a

primary school education – tell the story of an eighty years old illiterate who decides, after school fees have been eliminated, to enroll in a primary school and thus attend it along with small children in his short pants uniform. Goal number three – Promote the principle of equal rights – will tell the daily struggle of a police wo-man to have her work respected. The boys and girls also told the story of willing doctors who, turning down the chance of a decent life, look after mothers and their children (goals number 4 and 5) and of local artists and impressive theatre plays which theme is AIDS prevention by the use of condoms (goal number 6). They told of groups of women that plant trees and specialized in producing alternative energies in the slum (goal number 7). They also brought up the development cooperation problem (goal number 8) raising a question about the unknown final destination of the funds offered by the international organizations and which purpose was the upgrading f the slum they live in.

The project has a participatory approach, already tested in the same context in the making of two documentary films (TV-Slum, 2002, African Spelling Book, 2006) along with reportages commissioned by Italian and internatio-nal institutions (World Bank, UNESCO, Fondazione Ban-co di Sicilia).The project Millennium News has been sponsored by the Cooperation Unit of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

“When the world leaders undersigned the Millennium Development Goals, they committed themselves to help not less than 100 millions people to achieve better life conditions within 2020. To achieve this goal means to be able to face one of the most important social, economic and environmental challen-ges: a sustainable urbanization”.Kofi Annan

Millennium News is one of the instruments for the new information campaign “Away from poverty” promoted by AMREF with the contribution of the Italian Coope-ration. Further the mise in scene on the national and international networks, the campaign counts the pro-duction of a dvd and of an editorial product to promote in the schools and planning of meetings and projections in some italian universities.

8Millennium News

PROCESS AND STRUCTURE |

The Millennium News will be produced with the active parti-cipation of around eighty boys and girls of one of the poorest slums of Nairobi, Dagoretti. AMREF is working in the area sin-ce ten years with its project called “Children in Need”. The majority of the boys and the girls have already been trained in the use of a videocamera; some have been involved in the making of the African Spelling Book; all have already attended a stage on the Millennium Development Goals. A writing laboratory will be organized for the writing, col-lection and selection of the stories for the reportages. The youngsters audio/video filming and recording activity will be always supported by a director, a professional cameramen and a sound technician.The news’ structure will be similar to mainstream television

news: two anchormen (a boy and a girl), will introduce the topic and the reports. The television set will show a particular setting created by the youngsters with the aid of a professional set decorator, inside the slum’s area, using material found in the slum and its dumping grounds. The children will be finally involved in the preliminary phase of the editing.The reportages will be interpreting the universal values expres-sed by the MDG’s through original stories, typical characters and the slum’s human reachness and peculiar environment: sweet and bitter stories that will better explain the meaning of the MDG’s and indicate numbers of possible and practical solutions from people living with less than one dollar a day.

BACKGROUND |The project for a participatory video as a tool of rehabilitation, self empowerment and communication started in 2001 as part of “Children in Need Programme”. Since then the project, now called “Different Perspective” produced TV SLUM (2002, broadcasted in Italy by TELE+, LA7 and in Kenya by Nation TV, Citizen Tv, KTN), the African Spelling Book (2006, broadcasted by the National Geographic Channel in 146 countries of the world) and a series of reportages commissioned by institutions such as the World Bank and UNESCO. Resulting from a critical

analysis on the way mainstream media talk about Africa and its problems, the video training programme resulted, along the way, in a powerful tool to change perspective on Africa, a high educational potential for western audiences, and the capacity of dragging a growing number of boys and girls out from the street start their integration into society. Millennium News is a new attempt to look to Africa and to challenges of the poverty’s struggle from a different perspective, internal to the street life.

STYLE AND VISUAL APPROACH |As already highlighted on the participatory documentary fil-ms and reportages produced in the past, the choice of stories and characters, the freshness of the images, the innocence, the simplicity and the progressive and spontaneous language, all contributes in creating an original product, also suitable for a young audience. The idea is to establish, through the irony and the poetry of the youngsters approach, a strong empathy

between the filmmakers and the public.The TV-journalistic style “by the deep-low” will be useful to make people think about the function of the communications media to cope with so far reaching problems and will remake the big potentialities of people grown up in discomfort con-ditions.

MILLENNIUM NEWS Format: 8 events of about 7 minutes eachAUTHORS Giulio Cederna, John Muiruri, Angelo LoyDIRECTOR Angelo LoyPROJECT COORDINATOR Renata TorrentePRODUCTION COORDINATOR Gabriella GuidoPRODUCTION AMREF Italia, with the support of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs

8Millennium News

THE GOALS |

1 | ERADICATE EXTREME POVERTY AND HUNGER : reduce by half the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day, reduce by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger

2 | ACHIEVE UNIVERSAL PRIMARY EDUCATION: Ensure that all boys and girls complete a full course of primary schooling

3 | PROMOTE GENDER EQUALITY AND EMPOWER WOMEN : Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education preferably by 2005, and at all levels by 2015

4 | REDUCE CHILD MORTALITY : reduce by two thirds the mortality rate among children under five

5 | IMPROVE MATERNAL HEALT : reduce by three quarters the maternal mortality ratio

6 | COMBAT HIV/AIDS, MALARIA AND OTHER DISEASES : halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS, halt and begin to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases

7 | ENSURE ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY : Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes; reverse loss of environmental resources, reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water, achieve significant improvement in lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers, by 2020

8 | DIVELOP A GLOBAL PARTNERSHIP FOR DEVELOPMENT : Develop further an open trading and financial system that is rule-based, predictable and non-discriminatory, includes a commitment to good governance, development and poverty reduc-tion— nationally and internationally, address the least developed countries’ special needs. This includes tariff- and quota-free access for their exports; enhanced debt relief for heavily indebted poor countries; cancellation of official bilateral debt; and more generous official development assistance for countries committed to poverty reduction, address the special needs of landlocked and small island developing States, deal comprehensively with developing countries’ debt problems through national and inter-national measures to make debt sustainable in the long term, In cooperation with the developing countries, develop decentand productive work for youth, In cooperation with pharmaceutical companies, provide access to affordable essential drugs in deve-loping countries, In cooperation with the private sector, make available the benefits of new technologies— especially information and communications technologies