International Days: a bane or boon?

TAKE a good look at the calendar. You may not be fully aware, but almost every day in the year is the "International Day' for some good cause. Some are well-known and celebrated: International Women's Day, World Tuberculosis Day, World Environment Day, World Population Day, International Day of Indigenous People, Human Rights Day, World AIDS Day...

Can you keep track of all of them? I consider myself a relatively well informed person, but I am not able to put a date beside the World No-Tobacco Day, World Refugee Day, International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer, International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, International Day for Natural Disaster Reduction, Africa Industrialization Day, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, International Migrant's Day, International Day for the Abolition of Slavery.

The very day they happen, I may realize they exist, and they seem to vanish immediately after. Right now, what we have is no less than seven or eight international or world days per month, except for January, February, July and August, when people in the North are enjoying their winter or summer vacations. You see, there is logic to it.

Now my question is what do we do with all these international days and what do we expect from people? If you think of good-willing people, the militant of all good causes... Do we expect them to volunteer ten times every month?

Looking it from the perspective of a conscious citizen that supports development and social change in our poor damaged world, do we want him to wear all the ribbons like a General with all his medals? Do we want him or her to wear one hundred T-shirts with noble messages?

Let's leave for a moment the eyes of the well-intentioned citizen, and concentrate on how the mechanism works at the country level every time there is an international day to comply with.

If we look at all the health related world days, the burden on national ministries of health and UNICEF or WHO country offices to prepare one day-of-activities is irrational.

During the two or three months previous to the 'celebration' staff concentrates on developing posters and preparing press conferences, marches through the cities, songs with prevention messages, nice T-shirts, etc.

Usually media houses are very happy because they get good contracts to air ads, so that UNICEF or WHO are able to mention in their annual reports that 'the whole population was involved' and the messages were aired through the mainstream media and had incredible impact in the population of a particular country.

Many of these claims are not seriously substantiated, but nobody seems to care about it. The truth is: things are not getting better; something is wrong about doing so much noise and having so little results.

"Much Ado About Nothing", as William Shakespeare says.

I regard this type 'celebration' as a distraction from the daily and all-year long responsibility of fighting AIDS or TB (for example). I also find it is a heavy burden that is put on national institutions to satisfy an agenda that is imposed from New York, Paris, Geneva or Rome.

The high-profile events where the Minister of Health will march or the President of the country will send a message, takes a lot of time and energy from the daily work.

This has much to do with the concept of communication that most development organisations have. Not only do they tend to confuse information with communication, but also information with campaigns.

Very few development programmes think of communication as communicating with people, and even fewer with the idea of empowering the voices of people to better communicate. Very few see communication as a tool for participatory and sustainable development.

Most see it as something you add either when a programme is already in trouble, or to advertise the success of a project when it is about to end.

Communicating with people, with communities, with social organisations is not in the agendas of most development organisations. That is why they believe that making a lot of noise once a year keeps them visible.

Communication is absent from their programmes. They usually have a better dialogue with commercial marketing firms than with community leaders. These international days are only about visibility, not about social change.

No wonder we always end up with T-shirts and bumper-stickers, even in countries where people walk, and walk and walk to get to their villages.

The bottom line is that International Days are part of the agenda of donors in the North, not of developing countries. Through those singling days, development agencies in the North want to make noise about how good their work is.

In the South, where developing countries like ours exist, those days are useless. What we need is 365 days of attention to the issue, and not a one-day celebration for the dead and forgotten.