 Welcome everybody and welcome especially to Amy. Amy Corrigan has been a long time Birkmaniac. She's also the co-director of the Nollywood workshop. You can find a link to that on the bio on the web page. She's also an independent filmmaker and photographer and she is here to talk to us about Staphybola and what Nigeria got right. So welcome Amy. Thanks. It's so nice to be here and always great to come to Birkman for lunch and what a great crowd we have here today. I would really love this to be an informal presentation. I'm excited to share what I've got here but also it sounds like there's a lot of expertise in the room in terms of public health social media and Ebola. So please let this be a conversation more than a presentation. I am here to talk about Ebola in Nigeria really with three hats on. The first is as a director as I mentioned of Nollywood workshops which is a non-profit organization based in Lagos that uses entertainment as a vehicle for all kinds of health and social goals. We were founded to leverage Nollywood Nigeria's booming film industry as a platform and I've been working in and around Nollywood and Lagos since 2006. I'm also looking at Ebola as an independent filmmaker. I'm in the midst of doing a long-form feature documentary about Nigeria's containment of Ebola and the third is here at Birkman. I like thinking about the role of social media and entertainment when it comes to public health. So this conversation will be an attempt to weave all three of those hats together as well as the fourth hat which everybody has had on here is the snow hat and it's just nice to be in a room full of people again rather than digging out my driveway. So let me start with just a general introduction if I can just get this to view like we want it to and your full screen. Okay so on July 20th 2014 a man named Patrick Sawyer landed in Lagos Nigeria. Patrick Sawyer was a Liberian American who had had contact with Ebola in Liberia and reportedly came to Nigeria to seek better healthcare. He is known as Nigeria's index case. Now Lagos Nigeria has a population of 21 million. That's Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia combined. So immediately there was concern that this could be a public health disaster. Jeff Hawkins is U.S. Consul General to Nigeria and he said when you hear the words Lagos and Ebola in the same sentence what we're talking about is an apocalyptic urban outbreak. Now that didn't happen and I'm here to talk about why. Nigeria ended up with 20 Ebola cases and eight deaths contained in 42 days. If you compare this with the 12,000 cases of Ebola and 9,000 plus deaths that we've seen over the past 14 months in the other affected countries you see why the World Health Organization was quick to call this a spectacular success story. So I'm interested in what Nigeria got right both like I said for the purposes of our long feature film but also for today's talk I'm going to focus specifically on communications and technology. But I do want to touch on these other components that I think are really essential to the story so I won't go too in depth but just to give you a brief overview the people we see here are the doctors and staff at a hospital called First Consultant. They were the first doctors at the first hospital where Patrick Sawyer was brought after he was exhibiting signs. At first they didn't know that he had Ebola but as soon as they did they made a choice to contain him at First Consultant. This choice was described to me by the doctor pictured here as having a grenade in front of you you have three choices you can throw it over the fence you can take a step back or you can jump on it. First Consultant by containing Patrick Sawyer jumped on the grenade and the many of the nurses and doctors that this team made that decision with passed away but it's largely heralded as that choice as being the first significant step for Nigeria to contain this outbreak. Another really important component was the leadership of the government. Nigeria at this time over the summer was in the news for many other reasons besides Ebola. Boko Haram was a major issue the Bring Back Our Girls campaign was a major issue and many Nigerians and people in the world global community had lost their faith in Nigeria's government when it came to handling complex problems. That said both the president good luck Jonathan and more specifically the governor of Lego State Governor Fashola stepped up and made the type of decisive decisions in terms of doling out resources repositioning staff so that they could give this outbreak the emergency status that it needed and they did that in the early days of the outbreak which was again a critical component. Another big piece of this was logistics. Nigeria quickly turned their polio operation center to become their Ebola emergency operation center bringing many international staff from CDC doctors without borders WHO from Abuja to Legos where they were able to redirect a lot of their human capital as well as technology to containing the outbreak so logistics were a key piece of this and also capacity. Nigeria has the benefit of compared to some of the other countries that we're talking here really strong and getting stronger health system so there were pictured here you have staff from the African Genomics Center and also University of Legos where they were able to do testing of samples right away and confirm whether people had in fact been infected. This was critical and they were able to take those staff and volunteers and deploy them very quickly to critical places like the airport and borders here you see somebody trying to enter Nigeria and getting their temperature taken right away these steps were taken quickly and efficiently and before we go on I think it's important to say not taking away from Nigeria's strengths there's also an element of luck here Patrick Sawyer was a diplomat he landed in Legos he didn't come through a rural border he landed in Legos which is in many ways one of Africa's commercial centers a cosmopolitan city and he was a diplomat so he was taken very quickly to first consultant hospital which is one of the best hospitals in Nigeria so there was an element of luck here that not only was Patrick Sawyer elite he was given the set of services that are so often reserved for the elite in a place like Legos where there is quite a strong distance between the health care that the wealthy receive and the healthy that the poor receive so part of this reason that the outbreak never reached these densely populated slums was because it never went into that social strata luckily uh now I want to turn to communication and technology which I think personally because I'm a brick maniac is probably the most exciting part of Nigeria's story and I think about it in a couple ways one how can other countries learn from what Nigeria did and also how can we learn from Nigeria's use of communication and technology and turn that towards other major health issues both in West Africa and around the world so just a little snapshot on Nigeria Nigeria has a great fortune of being one of the highest mobile and internet penetrated countries in Africa I think it's the total population of Nigeria is 170 million and of that there's a hundred and fourteen million active mobile subscribers so that's 40 that's quite high and 40 percent of Nigeria is connected to the internet that makes them the hundredth plugged in country in the world but there's quite a difference between Liberia Sierra Leone Guinea where I believe there might be more experts in the room on this where the internet penetration is about 10 percent rather than 40 so this was an incredible advantage and I spend a lot of time giving my entertainment background spent a lot of time thinking about the power of the internet in Nigeria as a platform for communications and also as a commercial platform but here we see the benefit really of the internet as a utility that was already there and available for people to use and getting essential information across uh this is a piece that I'm not looking at too much in my current research but I just want to mention contact tracing in Nigeria is a key element of containing the Ebola outbreak every person who had been in contact with the index case Patrick Sawyer or someone who had been in contact with Patrick Sawyer had to be traced this ended up resulting in 18,000 meetings and monitoring of people who were in that sphere now because of Nigeria's work on polio there was some development of mobile technology that could be used on both on cell phones and in vehicles for people to map the contact tracing that means not just mapping the people who they're tracing it's mapping the tracers themselves to make sure that they're remaining accountable to the mission at hand it also meant that those who were in the field tracing with their mobile devices were able to quickly get that information back to headquarters which I'm not sure the exact percent I think it was 9% faster turnaround of information on this these critical points and that could be anything from is somebody who has Ebola remaining in their location or what is the temperature of a person who has had contact with somebody infected this is a lot of information it's critical in the early days that it's kept um contained and Nigeria did an excellent job with this and I'm quite certain that we'll see this technology extended from Nigeria to other countries and other outbreaks now because my focus is uh entertainment and communication and social media now I'm going to spend a little time on three case studies that I think are really powerful and exciting when it comes to Nigeria's success and the first is Ebola alert Ebola alert is a non-profit organization that was founded in the early days of the outbreak by volunteer doctors most importantly Dr. Lowell Bakari who is a dentist and public health aficionado who realized that there was something important to do they quickly started this Ebola alert Twitter account as a platform to both share information and respond to questions that were coming up in Nigeria's social media they started this entity and then the government brought them in to the Ebola operation center so it was a really unique moment where the public saw a need created a response and the government was able to fold it in into their into their intervention so rather than hearing me talking non-stop I thought it might be interesting for you to hear from some of the team at Ebola alert about what inspired them to start this and how it worked so I'm going to switch to a first video clip uh these are a series of interviews that I did on a recent trip to um Legos and let's see if we can play this it was a case study for Ebola outbreak in urban community urban densely populated community so it was extremely scary for everybody from those who are handling healthcare in Legos to the man on the streets and I can remember then on social media it was it was like a marketing sincerely you could palpate fear if you know how to feel to social media information you realize what people were saying and how they were saying it realize that this is just pure fear so part of what we realized we had to do then was to inform people because ourselves we were scared we were not sure where it was going to back then the statistics was 90 percent of cases died back then the statistics was there was no cure to Ebola so let me show you my office hello so when people ask Ebola like how do you people do this thing in this short while so at the moment we are working on like close to age project and we are moving the age project almost at the same speed but it's because the level of expertise and then the the we apply what we call design thinking so we are we are a big fan of design thinking here and we hope that we can actually contribute to the to the movement of design thinking as it were the lean methods of getting things done the creative core of things and the needs for to protocol to the to deploy a prototype instead of waiting for the full things to be done and they need to go out with the protocol with the prototype as fast as you can so that you test and get people to give you feedback so that you can get to the final product and you're out there in the shortest time possible taking away all of the bureaucracies the question was is there anything being done by the government to you know give people information on social media and the answer to that question was no and that was how it all started so we we created a we created a Twitter account just to inform people about Ebola that simple solution we started back then has been able to as we now have over 70 000 followers on Twitter and in the past few months of operation we've had over 90 million impressions on Twitter alone so but the problem we identified then was that most of the information that was available was too technical or people could not relate to them or some people were not aware that this information was available right now the population of Africa is 1.111 billion according to 2013 estimate but only 20 percent of that number only less than 20 percent of that number are actually connected to the internet so you cannot exactly say that Africa is on the internet because over 900 million Africans out of 1.1 billion people are not on the internet so we realized that we needed to develop a system whereby the same way we're engaging people online through social media and all of that we wanted a system that would help us reach out to people that were not online where we developed a system where we were able to recruit a lot of volunteers in different places we mapped where they were and those people were going to go out and they will talk to people that the internet will most likely not be able to reach and they were sharing information on Ebola and they were reporting in real time if you are looking for if you are looking for any solution any communication system that is pervasive enough that can reach as many Africans as possible you'll want to pick mobile telephony because in Africa out of the population of 1.111 billion you have over 750 million mobile subscribers things that are done with a creative mindset will need to be innovative will impact lives in a long in a very beautiful way so for example Ebola is indeed a design experiment and it has proven that design can do a lot so that's a short introduction to the work of Ebola alert and what I find so inspiring about their intervention is thinking that they were able to design brand launch a multi-platform social campaign on Twitter, Facebook, website, live chat and a 24-hour hotline in about a week on a volunteer budget and then the government signed on now imagine that same initiative in New York City or Texas just in your mind think about the time it would take and what it would cost to reach as many people as Ebola alert was able to reach in such a short time to me they deserve an incredible amount of credit not just in engaging the public on some very basic Ebola education in terms of what is Ebola how do you recognize signs and symptoms and what do you do if you or someone you know has signs and symptoms of Ebola they also were able to take some of the fear out of this they were available as a 24-7 resource for anybody with a question or concern we know what we know about infectious disease like Ebola is is fear leads to stigma which can lead to hiding isolating not reporting all the all the key things that can result in a much worse outbreak than Nigeria saw so also I think some of the key takeaways for me from Ebola alert was their savvy on taking the online quickly using it to engage the offline and then using the tools at hand and bringing that information back online next I want to share a little bit about lens on Ebola lens on Ebola was a multimedia campaign that my organization and three others produced in the first week as a response to some misinformation and lack of information we engaged 18 of Nigeria's top movie stars and a star director Tunde Kalani and we're able to produce three PSAs in five different languages for a budget of forty thousand dollars in seven days this is Tunde Kalani Nigerian star director this is just a shot behind the scenes you see a tell a simple teleprompter that was used to translate information that we were able to develop into scripts in partnership with the CDC making sure we had their key information translating it into the five different languages house a Yoruba Ebo pigeon in English and then finding stars that spoke those languages casting the PSAs and distributed them very quickly on multiple channels we were able to get these PSAs out on 10 major TV stations for radio stations as radio versions they were screening 24 seven on 100 public buses throughout the city we included them in community screenings and also of course on online channels we were had the great fortune of having a partnership with Facebook who in the early stages of the decent Nigeria recognized how major Facebook is for Nigeria I mean there was a recent survey that went out showing I think that 10 percent of Nigerians believe that Facebook is the internet we'll get to that later and but in this case that Facebook proved to be an incredibly effective tool which allowed us to get you know a million impressions on these videos within the first couple days and also these you see up here a few clips from the Facebook page where we posted the PSAs I think just as valuable as the media itself was the engagement that we had with the fans of the media where we were able to get their comments get their questions and respond to them and those informed future interventions we were able to build on the campaign with a star with a star Desmond Elliott is one of Nigeria's top actors and just to give you a sense of his reach he has 1.8 million fans on his own Facebook page so the CDC quickly recognized that his platform was an even more valuable platform than the CDC's page as far as Nigeria was concerned so we were able to team up with a rep from the CDC and do a live Q&A on Desmond's page where for two hours fans of Desmond could come and ask any question or concern that they had about Ebola now we thought that fans would come and ask a question here or there about Ebola and then more so ask about Desmond and his upcoming film or his romantic life we were shocked to find that we only in two hours we got I think three questions a minute only one of those questions was not Ebola related and the CDC said that by far it was the most meaningful social media exchange they've been able to have in Nigeria at this time and my takeaway for this one has very little to do with even my organization and what we did and all to do with the power of celebrity in the time of an outbreak Desmond in an environment that is often wrought with corruption and mistrust of public figures Desmond is somebody that the audience has a relationship with so when he comes on to a platform that they recognize in a voice that they trust people people listen we were able to take Desmond's work on just basic Ebola information like signs and symptoms and turn it into an anti-stigma campaign this was at the tail end of Nigeria's outbreak and our top priority was making sure that those who had been infected with Ebola and survived were welcomed back into their communities and he was a key figure in that for Nigeria I want to show you a video interview with a Nigerian star named Ricardo Ackbor he is a Yoruba star and also speaks speaks English and pigeon and start in our pigeon hand washing video so I'll show you a great interview with him and then a clip of the video just to put a little bit into context from a celebrity perspective what it was like to participate in this campaign I'm Ricardo Ackbor I'm an actor and I was part of the people that partook in Lens on Ebola we're all thrown into that kind of panic everybody was now trying to watch people started wearing gloves I mean the the fear was palpable seriously the line while we were shooting the Ebola was stay calm stop Ebola and the part I took I spoke in Pigeon English and that is my day to the wash hand all the time with warm water ashes and soap not to they prevent disease like Ebola Ebola but you're going to wash your hands just to wash hands wash them you know Ebola and a serious disease and we need to prevent and wear wear in fact you don't say you only say you find you too correct people need something that would really help their retention and thereby actors were called because yes some of us have that kind of a followership and when they see people they can recognize they want to see what message the people are trying to pass the drama made it something easier for people to want to sit and watch because normally you want to pass a message you don't just sit there and start talking for some other people it becomes boring so the entertainment it makes it stick for them because the message gets passed through some artistic ability which makes it indelible in your minds at all time and for us to come out and say this is what is happening this is what you need to do not to endanger yourself it went a long way it went a long way hello my people my name nabai Obankone idea to tell you the main debate about Ebola my brother my sister my father my mother all you small small picking remember to the wash your hand well well many times with water or ash especially if you don't touch person we see carry them go head center we government don't choose to wash our hand not the best defense where we get against Ebola and other disease then keep calm and stop Ebola rest stay healthy with information we correct and together with our healthcare workers we feed protect ourselves from Ebola get correct fact and share with you the question here was did he say water ice he said water or ash ash is a way if you have no access to water ash is a way to clean your hands so along with warm water and soap or hand sanitizer public health officials were recommending ash as a potential way of the lady in the previous episode also said something about ash okay exactly so that gives you a little taste of some of the communication that was going out on social media leveraging Nigeria's stars um we learned quite a bit from this we we tried three styles of PSA one that was sort of straight to camera like the last one you saw one that was dramatic very serious and one that had an element of humor and it was our hunch and then we were glad to find out that the humorous one worked the best it's what people wanted to share and it's also um the one that led to more retention of the key public health messages and also most importantly the hotline our number one aim in creating these videos was trying to make awareness of that 1-800 Ebola help ubiquitous and hopefully we played a small role in that uh let's see I definitely want to leave some time for a question so I'm going to speed through this last piece uh pictured here uh we have Dennis and Justina Dennis is an Ebola survivor and this is his wife fiance sorry Justina who passed away um Justina uh you'll hear from Dennis a bit more but just to share a little Justina was a nurse at the hospital first consultant and she was on her first day of the job when she had contact with Patrick Sawyer before they knew that he had Ebola so she was infected in the very early days um before many of Nigeria's um responses had been implemented so we're going to hear from Dennis about uh his fiance's experience and his experience and I'm including this interview long form because I feel it speaks to um far better than anything I can say really the way social media influenced people's experiences with Ebola in Nigeria and it also shows how we can leverage these tools to really make an impact so um just as a heads up this uh interview is a little bit emotional and a little bit graphic in places so here we go my name is Dennis Aka and I'm an Ebola survivor on the 20th of July that was when the first Ebola case came into Nigeria and um on the 21st of July my fiance resumed um in that same office in that same um organization where the in this case was admitted and that was how she got infected before them she was um two months gone she was pregnant if you know what I mean she was pregnant and we were planning to finalize our marriage plans by October so which means we are expecting the baby so um she got infected and the person because she was one of the nurses that cared for um the in this case and um when so you know when the uh Justina that's honey Justina Angelon she's um she's a wonderful person she inspired me a lot she she's um she's one person that um everybody knows her too uh in fact she she happens to be um she's an addict or let me say she was an addict to Facebook and that was how a lot of persons get to know that she was infected because um they could no longer see her on Facebook and even while in the isolation world she was Facebooking she was telling her friends the whole world you know where she is and you know who started praying for her who started you know that was when um some of her friends were campaigning for for the American government to send um um what they call it the the vaccine you know so um she's someone they've given the opportunity to meet over and over again I mean I mean two weeks after she got in contact with the in this case she went down she started she started vomiting and um she had a miscarriage along the that same day so I said okay so but on that day I knew this could be Ebola I started making calls call Diabola a lot call a lot of persons and that was how I moved out of the house when the process of taking care of behind the house I believe that was when I got infected as well but um I never mind or what all that was in my mind was um I just want her to be alive there was no volunteers there was no caregivers at the time because a lot of persons were scared why because um because of the information that says um 90 percent of those who are infected die which is nine out of ten and then Ebola is a deadly disease it's it's a it's a dead sentence you see so all this information going here and there people were scared to come around to help ten days after she was admitted she died and then two days after she died I started experiencing my own symptoms and you see one thing I did when I was in the estimation center was um we had the opportunity to go online so we had opportunity to we're giving our phones you know to do a lot of things so I was checking I was going online to I checked this number of survivors you know so I was listening to their stories how they survived what they went through and I said to myself this person can survive I am going to survive you see so they should always look um up to people who have survived the virus or the disease say if this person can survive which means I am going to survive I am not going to die you see so even though um the assistance came a little bit late but when everybody started coming out you know the response was was so high and the people started responding you know the caregivers the contact tracers they were tracing they were they were working 24 seven you see and um you know it's it's really it's really encouraging you know I'm so proud of what Nigeria did more especially legal states you see it wasn't easy but you know I'm proud I'm proud of Nigeria and um if every other country can emulate what Nigeria did you know in trying to contain Ebola I think um we'll fight this we'll fight this war we'll fight it and we'll definitely win I share that interview with you not just to illuminate the power of social media and communication when it comes to addressing lack of information or fear but also how powerful access to internet can be when it comes to hope and the psychology of a disease like Ebola is such that those who are infected need to be able to believe that they may have a chance of surviving and people who like Dennis were brave enough to um take on the stigma and come out and identify as a survivor and tell their story through the platforms available I believe have helped to reduce stigma both in Nigeria and in other affected countries here this bottom left picture is a picture that Dennis and the World Health Organization and many other organizations followed suit it's him after he's been declared Ebola free getting a haircut at its old barber so here I think it's a good time to stop and talk about issues presented and also opportunities I'm really excited to think about how what we've learned from Nigeria like I said can be applied to other health issues in Nigeria um and I'm also interested in thinking about how uh the digital divide comes up in this story where Nigeria is far better off than so many of its neighbors in terms of internet access and mobile penetration and I believe the success we've seen here is in large part due to that um so how do we extend some of our conversations about the internet as a utility that everybody deserves equal access to and make sure that we're keeping um places like Nigeria and Nigeria's neighbors in mind so that's what I've gotten I'm excited to hear from you guys question comments and also please share your expertise question are you differentiating between access to the internet and access to mobile devices and yes uh definitely um I'm okay so when the facebook question comes up that becomes important because facebook the reason so many um users consider it the internet is because it's often the only um application on their mobile phone that's low bandwidth enough and um cheap enough for them to get online and access so a person with access to a mobile device may have access to facebook who may not have access to a computer or be able to afford um internet time so I think it's an important distinction between access to mobile and access to internet and it's also important to parcel out um what we make sure people have access to through mobile so mobile broadband is another big issue on the rise for Nigeria and just like um many Nigerians leapfrogged over landlines to mobile phones I suspect we'll see them leapfrogging over internet access to mobile broadband you mentioned that one of the most successful messages was one that contained humor yeah and I was just wondering if you could go into detail or give us an example of what you mean and is Nigerian humor different from other humor and if so how because humor is a very broad term and I wonder if you could be more specific sure so I'm speaking specifically about uh nollywood style video which is our domain at nollywood workshops and the type of humor that we see playing out in those films is often very dialogue heavy humor stemming in large part from Nigeria's theatrical tradition so we learned that the joke in our in our hand washing video was sort of a slapsticky gendered joke where the woman's washing her hands again and again and the husband's like you're washing your hands all day like why do you keep washing your hands seriously you're still washing your hands which played out in its own way in each of the languages that we used but the general tension between the husband and the wife was there and then the resolve was she's saying basically you dummy don't you know that hand washing is the most definite way of protecting yourself from Ebola and other diseases which is where he's like oh you're always right again which is sort of a standard sort of gender play that we see a lot in nollywood films so that's one example and what we were comparing it to was another dramatic version a PSA that we produced to raise awareness of signs and symptoms where again it was a husband and wife environment but a much more serious woman's expressing signs and symptoms husband's concerned there's drama there's emotion and they decide to call the hotline which was an extension of some of the more dramatic style nollywood films that we see did that answer your question a little bit yes good how was the message gotten out into parts of the country where the government doesn't really the central government doesn't have effective control where Boko Haram is the authority or did the the epidemic state combine the logo so that wasn't an issue luckily the epidemic state can find to both Legos and Port Harcourt which is in the southern part of the country all of the communications interventions i'm aware of like ours like Ebola Alert were careful to make sure they were communicating in house that they had house of partners in the northern region but knowing full well that social media would not penetrate those audience in the ways that it luckily did in Legos I think had we seen an outbreak in the northern part of the country on the communication side we would have seen much heavier efforts in radio which remains the best the best medium in those parts of the country but I think it's it's very lucky that the outbreak didn't travel to that region because like you said it's not just lack of government controls last lack of access to basic services hi hi I was wondering if you could speak to some extent about the framework that you use when you think about creating the adverts that you have and I'm saying that just simply because I feel like there's a muddying of the waters between two sort of separate messages one is about containment of Ebola and from that perspective all you really need to do is ensure compliance of a population to allow for them to allow for contact measures to occur right to allow for contact tracing to occur is the Ebola is the actual need that you have to do for Ebola to be stopped you need to allow health workers to be able to go into a community and accept tracing and for them to be open and divulge that information so that's one thing that you do everything else that you do outside of that is being an entrepreneur of a crisis and when you're an entrepreneur of a crisis there's a lot of stuff you can do with that right and what your message is changes as a result of it so for example the picture of the person the wife washing your hands at the kitchen and he says why are you washing your hands all the time right what's a bad message if we're talking about learning for the future you should have asked why do you always wash your hands when you leave public transportation why do you always wash your hands right after you make a meal why do you always wash right and you tie the message to some deeper learning in the moment because you have that entrepreneurial component to this right you have the opportunity for a learning moment as a result of a crisis right so there are two two separate things that are going on and your messaging sometimes speaks to one sometimes speaks to the other and sometimes mixes and I wonder if you separate those and acknowledge them more in an actual framework that you might actually have a better way of distinguishing what it is that you're trying to do and what you're accomplishing yes would you like to come work with our organization um no everything you just said is so important we had one mandate and it was urgent which was help us manage fear we were working with the CDC and WHO to work with Nigerian celebrities to help get the message keep calm and stop Ebola across and that message was crafted one for the keep calm part don't no fear manage hysteria and stop Ebola as in stop Ebola together we're in this together um there's a lot that we were intending to do differently on our next round I mean that you hit it right on the head with the hand washing video there are also some elements of that hand washing video which it hurt the sink with the glasses probably not the most hygienic set for that message to get across um and we were eager to reiterate with another round of PSAs but we didn't need to because the the outbreak was contained in that timeline I think there is a tension between managing uh fear and creating a relationship with an audience and getting essential information across that might be pedantic and if you do the pedantic one too much it can be at the expense of the other the reason these videos worked is because they were Nigerian produced with Nigerian stars and didn't have the sort of global international development feel to them they looked like nollywood movies and I think we did revisions back and forth back and forth back and forth with the CDC on the scripts making sure that we were hitting their key notes but making sure that we were maintaining from the perspective of the audience an entertainment field that would help maintain the trust of the audience and I think there is attention there and while we luckily don't have the chance to iterate on Ebola in Nigeria we're eager to take this campaign lens on and apply it to lens on malaria lens on polio and I think we'll be able to test out a lot of the things that you raised I was wondering the application of your like the sharing like facebook and how those things apply to the older population of the country because I mean all my friends I'm Nigerian and all my friends share that I saw those videos on facebook but then in order to like to show like my parents it would have to be like pick the laptop off right and be like do you want to see this video versus them going so was that like an effort to like ask people to do that or because another way of doing that was so so share it through texts right was that something that people did or maybe like put it in front of nulliwood movies like because nulliwood's problems like things in beginning exactly was there like some effort like in that yes I'll go backwards all awesome questions the first one in terms of putting the PSAs in front of nulliwood movies yes specifically we have an edited version of the hand washing one which like you mentioned applies to so many other health issues and infectious diseases that is now going in front of Tunde Kalani's latest dazzling mirage at community screenings around lego so I think it that PSA has been seen by 750,000 people last week in open community screenings and we hope to place them in front of like you said DVDs which nulliwood DVDs have a chance of reaching upwards of 10 million people for a very low cost in terms of the how do you take the plugged in audience and make sure that those messages extend to our parents or the generation beyond I think there is a play for making sure that online affects the offline again and our other part of our tagline was share what you know and so maybe that's through sharing this video maybe that's through SMS maybe that's through just sharing the facts and in conversation and we we found that these social channels were really helpful in correcting myths to that point there was a rampant myth right at the height of the outbreak that said that salt water could carry Ebola so we actually had a couple people pass away by drinking salt water and bathing in salt water so much so that it poisoned them and they died so became an urgent need to address that myth and Twitter was effective in that but I think it's there's reason to believe that it's might start on Twitter but then it extends to conversations at home and if there's one person who's gotten the facts in their family I have a staff member who was recounting to me the story where he had a sister call him and tell him about the salt water cure and encourage him to have his family do do the salt water and he was working on our campaign with us so he knew that salt water was a myth that the Ebola community was actively trying to address he said what he did was he said thanks who told you that and he called that person and said who have you called and then he got on his mobile device and he called every single person that that that family member had been in contact with and I think that's just a nice example of how the online engagement can extend to the offline and then as far as SMS goes yes the like I said lego state government was incredibly active throughout this outbreak through their Ebola emergency operation center and they were sending blanket SMS I think through all the carriers encouraging people to stay aware of signs and symptoms to report any incidences to the hotline which was free hi it sounds like Facebook was a big part of getting this message out and I was wondering if Facebook provided like three ads or if you had to buy them yes I wondered how often they were shown to people like product placement I wondered how you knew of that was working you know yes all of that part of it like how much did Facebook help you versus how much did you have to fit things up yourselves and hopefully Facebook helped us a lot Facebook what Facebook did is they agreed to post our content on their Facebook safety page and use their magic algorithm and make sure that that showed up in all the feeds of all the affected countries then they ran they for free ran ads against it and boosted all of our posts so they gave us the special sauce and yes thank you to Facebook and I'm torn about how to think about that moving forward do we try and craft a relationship with Facebook like that so that all of our public health interventions have that component what are the pros and cons of that they were very generous in their sort of fire hose approach to this content and it preceded their own Facebook's Ebola campaign I think they deserve some applause for their involvement in this in this outbreak um I'm on the record so I can't say I'm off the record but I think we have to balance that with the commercial interest that Facebook has in it in expanding its subscribers in Africa and think that through carefully it was a jump on that in terms of because I know many if you want to like reach many like nonetheless Nigerians about Africa as well most people are also moving onto like Instagram and Twitter now they are bigger it's bigger it's getting just as big as Facebook and also WhatsApp is something that is really big now that people don't use Black Berries anymore exactly the movie from Black Berries has increased WhatsApp so that's something that people use my mom now knows how to use WhatsApp so that means everyone knows how to use WhatsApp so um I think that's something you can also explore I think you're right we're looking at Twitter has been central all along um the thing I find tricky about Twitter is the skewed metrics of diaspora and international community in terms of their engagement with the tweet so we've had a challenge with our Twitter metrics and that might be because we don't have the same relationship with Twitter that we do with Facebook where they're willing to help us get an accurate demographic of where people are coming from again but no Twitter I would put at the top of the list in terms of both getting information out and getting a mapping of what the information environment looks like and I'm really excited to explore WhatsApp as a compliment to SMS for a future any other questions or comments really enjoyed listening to your presentation and contrasting that in my mind so the work we're doing still in Guinea where we have a radio network essential FM radio that's networked to 23 community radios in the world radio network and you know there you have to imagine a completely offline environment and still very rife with rumors so school should have started back and is not in because it's a whole new set of rumors that have kind of come up and there's a lot of different reasons for that but one of the things that strikes me the most about the difference between what you've experienced in Nigeria and pretty much what we saw in Liberia CRME owned where we're also working and Guinea is really the sort of public policy and political engagement side and I think from the from the get go in Guinea and in all three countries the population and our journalists and people were reporting cases and the government was denying for political reasons the existence of Ebola Sierra Leone was coming off of a cholera epidemic which had really hurt the country there was a lot of stimulation around there and so they had a very very hesitant to actually declare a public emergency so you lost this key period they also tried to control any kind of information that went out and so and even the international community bought on to that so the journalists that understand their their audience and speak the local languages and speak the idiom and understand the humor and understand how to craft PSAs that are credible and will have effect we're told no everything has to go to the ministry of information for the ministry of health which were the two weakest the weakest links in those countries so you know you had a you missed a really important window because there was an idea that we're going to control information so we come from the top and we're going to create messages that are sometimes created offshore so you know in London or in DC we're going to pump those out and I think we saw very quickly that that was not going to work and in Guinea we saw that tragically when journalists were and a group of talk workers were actually killed attacked by community and so it I think there's a lot of reasons for that and I think those are what as we look at these you know the four countries really and try and get some lessons I think those are important differences and I think I'm just stunned and really impressed by how quickly you and your team could put out some really high quality and for very good price when you look at some of the funding that BBC media action and others right they're still trying to put out their PSAs now that they that are so out of date and in the wrong languages so what you've done is really impressive and I think that rapid response locally is something that is really key in any kind of you know as soon as the information is out of date you lose your credibility with your audience right if you're not talking about the rumor that's circulating right now then you are not it's coming from outside or somewhere internationally completely and for me that underscores Legos's incredible human capacity where you have the entertainment industry in place trained professionals who can script shoot edit export and distribute in multiple languages in a week you have designers developers social media experts who are there working understanding the environment and and ready to seize the opportunity and so my takeaway for this is the really the importance for training in these creative sectors and in design and development in some of these places where not only is there a real economic reality of having sustainable careers in those fields but also real impact that can be made when the content is coming from a local perspective and quickly and in terms of the government yeah I can't really say enough how governor fashola's response immediate response to Ebola and Legos led to this containment really as you know ministry of information ministry of health everything can be either amplified and expedited or shut down by a ministry and his both calling an emergency and then releasing the funding I think let everything happen which to me you know be really exciting I think fashola will have a unique legacy as a African leader who demonstrated good governance and I'd love to talk to anybody who's thinking how the relationship between good government good governance and public health at the state and city level hi why was it that movie stars or stars had such an important role and it sounds like in essence they were the creation of the media enterprise helped solve this as members so Nigeria has a long history of its entertainment sector nollywood which is a driving force in the Nigerian economy and the audience loves these stars and the narrative around it for our work and I think in the general nollywood story is people were tired of seeing American movies they wanted to see stars that they could relate to and that is to me the driving force of why nollywood films are so popular in Nigeria and regionally and then again why those stars have nollywood's been going on for about 30 years now it seems like one thing that was probably helpful here is that I guess Nigerians have a fairly friendly relationship to the US so a message that that's coming from the US like you're having the cdc on that celebrities facebook page is well received would this have been harder to do in a country where the population was not friendly to the US definitely absolutely and I think it's it's not just the that the audience is friendly to the US it's that some of those agencies like cdc have a long history of working in Nigeria and other health issues so they are sensitive to the landscape and um have a little bit of a better idea how to frame key information in a way that will be received and trying to do this in Sudan or Libya would be really different right and I think um also even in in Guinea where there was general mistrust about western influence on the origins of the outbreak we don't have that necessarily well I should say we don't have that in Lagos right and again I think had Ebola shown up in another part of Nigeria we might be having very different conversations today would the nollywood stuff have been as useful yes so when we think about working in northern Nigeria we work with connywood which is Nigeria's house a film industry based out of Kano so while the our thoughts around content would have been similar um developing house of scripts with house of stars in a house of storyline style our distribution would have been different we wouldn't have been able to rely on um facebook youtube twitter in the same way they might have catalyzed an engagement but they wouldn't have been the bulk of it we would have leaned much more heavily on dvd radio um and even broadcast so again I think the the content is the same but the distribution is different and that was an issue for us we through facebook we found that we were surprised to find that a large percentage of our audience on these videos was coming from Sierra Leone um Liberia and that it was our first real metric that nollywood stars have huge followings outside of Nigeria but then when we wanted to extend the um campaign we couldn't in good faith say that that kind of content would have the same kind of distribution in a place like Liberia where the landscape just isn't the same we could have written a grant but our conscience wouldn't let us you know we talk about using twitter metrics facebook metrics and so on do you have a way of tracking this trickle down effect of the messaging into illiterate communities no no not for this and I think one of the things we were remiss in not doing was a pretest for this content because we didn't have time um had we we could have built out a much more robust evaluation of how that content played um in illiterate communities but I think what we had going for us on that is that it wasn't just English it was Yoruba evo pigeon and we had you know television and radio where um local languages could be heard and understood but no I think our one failure and um maybe Ebola alert is a little bit different on this because I know they're um advancing their institution to take on all other kinds of hopefully um we'll all get a little bit better at evaluation I think that's one of the general challenges and often failures of people focus on um the creation of public health communication and content are often not the people who are smart about evaluating it and in this situation the the challenge of getting it out and getting it out as the as fast as possible led to some compromises on the research side steps you're working on or is this project now finished um well so um maybe just to not speak about my next steps um I'll give you sort of next steps for everybody involved Ebola alert is um still working on Ebola and we'll stay working on Ebola till Ebola's eradicated in which point they'll probably pivot and turn their platform as a tool for other um diseases my organization along with the three other partners we have which is the co-creation of Nigeria Niger Medic 247 which is a team of volunteer doctors and main fame productions which is a Lego space production house we're working on also pivoting our lens on campaign to other health issues in Nigeria my organization all the workshops is in the midst of several um projects producing feature film content narrative feature film content as a vehicle for public health issues all throughout Nigeria and personally um with a filmmaker Sam Russell out of New York City we're in the beginning phases of doing a long form feature film on Nigeria's Ebola containment and some of the interviews you saw today are part of our research materials for framing this story and I knew that some of the social media technology stuff would be left on the cutting room floor in terms of the 24 action thriller um the containment story but I thought this was a great audience to share with here thanks thanks guys thanks for coming