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William C. Shelton
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(The
opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville News
belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect
the views or opinions of The Somerville News, its staff or publishers.)
A
modest two-room office in Ball Square is home to a media company with a
global reach. Working in 20 countries around the world, Spectrum Media
has designed successful campaigns to promote democracy in Mali,
nonviolent conflict resolution in Jordan, environmental conservation in
Madagascar, family planning in Tunisia, and sustainable agriculture in
Senegal and Malawi.
The Tunisian government hired Spectrum to
encourage water conservation. Its territories bordering the Sahara are
sparsely dotted with troughs, fed by wells. Often the nomadic peoples
who used them carelessly left the spigot open when they moved on,
wasting precious water. Spectrum designed inexpensive and durable
ceramic tiles, embedded in the troughs, with quotes from the Quran
admonishing Muslims to conserve water. The impact was dramatic.
Investors
in the Jakarta stock exchange were putting only 15 percent of their
funds into local companies that would build the Indonesian economy.
Five years after Spectrum's media campaign, the proportion was 85
percent.
Spectrum's principal, Jamil Simon, lives on Willow
Street, a half block from his office. His parents were Iraqi Jews who
fled Baghdad in the 1930s, first to Lebanon and then to Egypt. When
Rommel's Afrika Corps was bearing down on Cairo in 1941, they took
seaplanes, flying from lake, to river, to lake, to Capetown, South
Africa. From there they sailed across the South Atlantic, which was
free of the Nazi wolf pack, to Recife, Brazil, took a boat to Miami and
a train to New York City, where Jamil was born and his father opened a
branch of his bank.
Jamil fell in love with film in college and
began making documentaries upon graduation. In 1969, after working in
Baltimore with only three days off over eleven months of filming, he
came to Cambridge to visit his girl friend. A hitchhiker asked him if
he was interested in a Boston-area job, and at the age of 24, he became
director of Apt Associates' film department in Cambridge. He's been
here ever since.
Whenever possible, Spectrum works with
indigenous people to develop their capacity to continue media work. In
Malawi, Spectrum set up a media center that produces radio and TV
programs to promote sustainable agriculture.
The Malawi
project offers insight into how multimedia campaigns can be effective.
The company produced a package to train poor farmers in new
income-generating practices such as beekeeping and fish farming
Each
medium has its particular strengths. Print is best for conveying
factual information, but many farmers are illiterate. Video is better
suited for communicating motivational themes. Radio can reach a broad
audience inexpensively, but many farmers do not have radios.
Face-to-face communication delivers information most effectively, but
is costly.
Spectrum produced booklets that, through pictures,
taught farmers how to undertake beekeeping and aquaculture. Trainers'
manuals explained more technical details and the reasons for conducting
specific practices. Videos demonstrated them and included successful
beekeepers talking about how beekeeping had improved their impoverished
circumstances. Flyers, calendars, and posters promoted training and
reminded farmers of important practices. The newly created media center
produced 150 radio programs containing motivational and educational
information.
Jamil says that taking on a new assignment is like
being parachuted into a completely unfamiliar world, with its own
rules, culture, language, and issues. You have to decode it all to get
information out to the people who need and can use it.
You can't arrive with solutions. You have to constantly listen.
Too
often, development organizations do not provide the information needed
for indigenous people to become self-sufficient. In so doing, they
encourage dependency.
Spectrum's current project tackles a
complex and fascinating challenge. Warlords in Sierra Leone, Liberia,
Angola, the Congo, and the Ivory Coast enslave the locals to mine
diamonds, which they use to finance mass murder, rape, and child
armies. Legitimate diamond traders throughout the world have joined in
a compact called the Kimberly Process. They hope to ensure a secure
chain of custody from diamond miners to markets so they may exclude
"blood diamonds."
In the Central African Republic, miners
excavate legitimate diamonds from riverbeds. They think of themselves
as agriculturalists, but have had to give up farming in order to make a
living. In turn, the mining process destroys the land's capacity to
sustain agriculture.
Miners hold their individual plots by
traditional rights, agreed upon by their communities. The state has it
own statutory ownership definitions. Claim jumpers take advantage of
this difference by registering plots as their own.
A
Vermont-based organization is working with mining communities to map
out and attach GPS coordinates to individual plots and register them
with the government. The more miners that become legitimate, the more
their diamonds can be traded internationally, increasing the
government's tax revenue.
Spectrum is developing a campaign to
encourage diamond miners to register and government officials to make
this easier, teach miners diamond evaluation so that predatory traders
do not take advantage of them, and ultimately train them in
environmental restoration and more lucrative agricultural practices.
Once developed, the campaign can serve as a template in other
diamond-producing countries.
Spectrum is but one of many Somerville-based concerns that are quietly producing innovations with global impacts.
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