Other Projects

A View from the South - International Broadcasters' Conference

 As part of the View from the South project, and following on from the success of the first MDGs in Focus conference, the One World Broadcasting Trust and TVE - Television Trust for the Environment - organised an international broadcasters’ conference, which took place in Amsterdam at the Tropen Institute (left) from 28th February to 1st March 2007.

You can view a complete list of participants, and find out more about the outcomes of the conference - which included the creation of special programmes in the UK, Belgium, South Africa and elsewhere.

The conference was attended by over 35 senior broadcasters from around the world, who contributed to the international debate about progress, (or lack of) towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and the prospects for meeting them in this last crucial decade to 2015.

The aim of the conference was to catalyse a package of popular, engaging and accessible programmes which look at how the decisions on aid, trade and debt redemption taken at the G8 meeting two years ago, and endorsed at the September 2005 UN Summit in New York, are helping developing country governments move forward on their MDG promises, and how this impacts on the lives of ordinary people in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Participants debated and explored fresh programme formats, approaches and ideas for covering MDGs to appeal to a range of different audiences. It will lay the foundations of a network of broadcasters interested in working together to cover progress on the MDGs over the final 8 years.

 

"If we continue, as we've been doing since 2000, making the Millennium Development Goals nice aspirations – lovely targets everyone shares in these big goals for humanity – but not acting on the ground, these goals will simply not be met in dozens of countries, and large regions of the world...We are talking about millions of people who die every year of extreme poverty, people who die because they are too poor to stay alive. And this situation not only will continue, it will get worse unless we decide that we have to make sure that it gets better. The Goals are still achievable, we have a decade left to go..."

Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University – TVE Life series 2005