-Jessica Mayberry How can the disadvantaged earn a living from their creativity? Why are nearly all the “base of the pyramid” micro-businesses supported by microcredit agencies based on manual labor, or super-local activities like driving a rickshaw or running a small shop? Since much of the music we love today,...
– Jessica Mayberry My partner Stalin and I are seated in the video laboratory of VCU.br in Sao Paulo, Brazil, with VV’s nine Video Fellows. We’re conducting a workshop in an area that is new for us – and which appears to be new also for the whole field of...
Jessica with Samvad CVU, 75% sustainable from outside projects. There’s an ongoing conversation, in the west at least, about the death of old media. Traditional journalism, magazines, book publishing houses, broadcasting stations, the corporate music industry – all are scrambling to find revenue as advertisement dries up and more and...
Image from Alamy via the Economist. Both the NY Times and the Economist reported last month that mobile phones are aiding development in fascinating new ways. Just to name a few: The Grameen Foundation‘s phone app helps rural Ugandan farmers track crop diseases before they spread, sending digital photos and...
Mahima Kaul is a journalist from Delhi who is working as Partnerships Director at VV. She was on hand at the August CVU Camp to conduct interviews and film the CV Camp Malegaon is a small town where a local film industry has grown, perhaps one of the most successful...
Democracy or chaos? The BBC’s two-part radio series on citizen journalism asks if our new era of citizen reporting will deliver us a brighter future, or replace un-biased, fact-checked investigative reporting with inaccurate, unaccountable opinion. The reporter talks to bloggers and academics in the world’s most repressive countries, including Myanmar,...
It’s 6:32 pm. The people are just gathering in. There’s an excitement in the air in anticipation of the first community video oscars or “Coscars”. Stalin and Jessica are up on stage – they seem as excited to be able to give the awards as the producers are about getting...
Kanchan from Apnaa Malak Ma CVU, conducting research at a local school. VV’s videos are really all about encouraging audiences to step up to local challenges, whether they give the postal address of corrupt officials, show how you can access microcredit, or tell you your right to medical care. But...
