The UN Digital Media Lounge

The UN Digital Media Lounge is the hub for all journalists, press members, bloggers and NGO representatives to meet, mingle, exchange ideas and follow the UN MDG Review Summit.

NYC is on lock down, but if you decide to take the metro or walk, you will be just fine and get to your destination quickly.

The UN Digital Media Lounge is held at the 92 Y. As I approach the registration table, I am asked for my business card. In return I receive a tag that allows me to enter the lounge in the next few days. There are talks every 2 hours on various issues related to the UN MDGs.

I get there just on time for the ICT4D - Innovation and MDGs Talk given by:

• Wayan Vota, Senior Director, Inveneo (moderator)
• Robert Kirkpatrick, Director, UN Global Pulse
• Erica Kochi, Innovation Unit, UNICEF
• Linda Raftree, New Technology, PLAN West Africa Regional Office
• Jim Rosenberg, Head of Social Media, World Bank

It is truly amazing to see journalists, bloggers and NGO representatives from all over the world in just one room. Their laptops are open and they are connected to the FREE wireless Internet service that enables them to blog/report on the events real time, check updates on other websites and ensure they are up to date.

The ICT4D - Innovation and MDGs Talk was highly interesting, a mix of ideologist views and a humble Jim Rosenberg, Head of Social Media World Bank, who sat on stage defending the World Bank Social Media and Data Protection Policies. The moderator Wayan Vota, Senior Director Inveneo, who had invited me here after reading an article about my trip of techtrendsng.com (Thank you Kenneth for publishing it), was highly provocative asking questions that mattered and hopefully made policymakers think of new and better approaches to solving the MDGs. Some of the questions were:

• What good is the Internet in developing countries if there is no local content?
• What are the ideal ways of generating content for people who cannot read?
• How can we bring local content generators from all over Africa together?
• What can we do about the quality of content in Africa?
• How can we motivate young people in Africa?

I immediately thought of the reason why I was in New York and realized that the WSYA is a wonderful way of bringing content generators from all over the world together in one place, so how about a local competition in each and every African country that can help bring these African Content Champions together? There’s a lot to think about and a lot of work ahead of me and the other young industry champions. Let us work together to ensure we have high quality digital content and are not flooded with content that does not address our problems, culture and way of thinking.

I stayed for a quick chat and some food and one more talk. This talk was on the effectiveness of UN initiatives to implement the MDGs. It became so apparent that most policy makers and decision makers only see half the problem and do not understand that the MDGs are interlinked. They say they are fighting hunger, poverty and disease and even though people now have food and drinking water they are dying from diarrhoea because the sanitation facilities are just as poor as ever. Representatives from the UNDP and the World Water Project say we need to go full circle and communities need to reject projects that are executed half way. NGOs need to put efforts and funds together to achieve the greater cause instead of working against each other. We need to combine HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns with family planning campaigns; water and healthcare campaigns with sanitation campaigns; immunization and deworming campaigns. This combination leads to the reduction of funds needed and efforts that need to be put in.

And most of all we need to find a way to sustain these projects, link our intervention approaches. Do we come up with new strategies or simply re-engineer and re-emphasize the old strategies? We need to involve communities and identify their overall needs before we start partial execution of a project. Every little effort does help, but these little efforts need to interlink like the pieces of a puzzle if we want to meet the MDGs in 2015.