World Wide Fund (WWF) awards SAMAA TV for supporting research in the field of conservation and environment

World 

World Wide Fund (WWF) awards SAMAA TV for supporting research in the field of conservation and environment

Speaking at the award ceremony, Amir Jahangir, Chief Executive Officer, SAMAA TV said, “Environmental conservation is an issue that directly affects our generation and the next. It is therefore important that we do everything possible to not only create awareness about what we can do but also contribute with what needs to be done now. We are all responsible for what we will be handing over to our next generation; they should not say that we did not care about them.”

WWF – Pakistan held its annual Syed Asad Ali Conservation Award (SAAC) and the Living Planet Award ceremony on 29th March 2010 to honor and recognize organizations and individuals, who have carried out notable contributions to conserve wildlife and the natural resources of the country. SAMAA TV, one of Pakistan’s leading news channels was awarded the Conservation recognition award

in appreciation of being the only media channel in the region to show leadership in advancing environmental and conservation program through communication and public outreach.

The award distribution ceremony was held at the Ali Institute under the presence of leading representatives from the Government, civic society, environmental agencies, academia and the media.

Mr. Jahangir appreciated WWF Pakistan’s initiatives to recognize the contributions within conservation of environment stating that environmental awards were an important mechanism to encourage business and society to meet the Pakistan’s sustainable development and environmental programs. “Award schemes can provide a very useful way of stimulating improved environmental performance by organizations and showcasing good examples of innovation and best practice – the media industry has to play a significant role to ensure Pakistan reaches the desired targets”, said Jahangir.

The special recognition award acknowledges SAMAA TV’s contribution to student’s research in field of conservation and environment and its role in engaging and shaping public response to environmental conversation program.

SAMAA TV is the first media channel in the Asian region to be offering scholarships for public university students pursuing master level degrees in environmental sciences. SAMAA is also launching structured thematic green media campaigns every month for people to participate in various initiatives such as ‘Say No to Plastic Bags’, ‘Earth Hour’, ‘Beach Cleaning’, ‘Plantation,’ and ‘Make Your Carbon and Water Foot Prints Small and Green’, all of which are designed to be visually appealing and environmentally informative.

While addressing the participants and audience of the ceremony, Mr. Ali Hassan Habib, Director General, WWF – Pakistan and Dr. Kauser Abdulla Malik, Chairman Scientific Committee expressed their compliments to the award recipients.

“This special environment recognition award has been awarded to SAMAA for its innovate initiatives on the subject of environment and more importantly for its commitment which is transparent when we look at the positive results, which have emerged from these initiatives – This has made SAMAA a deserving “Environment Champion” said Mr. Ali Hassan Habib,

The Syed Asad Ali Conservation (SAAC) Award is a tribute to Syed Asad Ali for his inspiring role in bringing forth the importance of conserving the environment for a better tomorrow.

In his concluding remarks, Amir Jahangir encouraged more organizations to seek recognition for their environmental performance. Mr. Jahangir said that media need to go beyond simple reporting and take up issues towards educating communities and create awareness for the well being of the society. He said that it was important to take a lead and get involved in this process.

This year, the SAAC Award was presented to Mr. Ayub Dablo, Asgher Ali Detho and Ashfaq Ahmed Ashufta for their efforts as conservationists in their respective areas. Ayub Dablo received this award for his contributions towards the plantation and conservation of mangroves over an area of more than 495 hectares in Keti bunder. Mr. Ashafaq Ahmad Ashufta was selected for SAAC Award for the continued efforts that he made to conserve the Kalij Pheasant with the involvement of local community in Jafferabad village of Abbottabad.

Society for Social Development and Conservation of Nature, Lasbella received the Living Planet Award for a Project to ensure the sustainable utilisation of fisheries resources with the involvement of local communities in Lasbella.

Certificate of appreciation were also presented to Mr. Samad Dawood, CEO of Dawood Corporation for donating an amount of Rupees 2.5 million to WWF – Pakistan and to Ms. Raina Saeed Khan upon receiving an Award at UN Summit on the article that she has written on Keti Bunder.

SAMAA TV’s commitment to being a socially responsible broadcaster has been widely appreciated on both national and international forums. It has been recognized as an innovator and leader for many initiatives and is the first media channel in Pakistan to have been honored with the Asian Corporate Social Responsibility Excellence Award 2009 for the Polio Control Cell stewardship. It is also the first media channel in Pakistan to have received the National CSR Excellence Award and also Pakistan’s first Innovation Journalism Health award from UNICEF and Ministry of Health, Government of Pakistan.

SAMAA TV is one of Pakistan’s leading private satellite television channels, which takes pride in its fair, factual and independent news coverage through its on-the-hour bulletins, breaking stories, incisive political analysis and current affairs programs. The channel is the first media channel is Pakistan to have established a well-integrated Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Program as part of it business activities. SAMAA TV’s CSR program carries various initiatives within health, education, environment and outreach programs focusing on improving the socio-economic situation of Pakistan.

The channel has also made a niche for itself through its programs on women and youth issues besides infotainment and sports. SAMAA TV, launched in December 2007 has network of district correspondents and five bureaus across Pakistan along with international stringers in the Middle East, Europe and North America.

Stanford salutes SAMAA TV's Polio Control Cell Initiative with UNICEF Pakistan

SAMAA TV's Polio Control Cell was considered one of the most innovative initiatives for the media's role as a watchdog on Heath care Delivery Mechanisms, at the 6th international conference on Innovation Journalism at Stanford University, California, USA.

SAMAA TV is a liberal Urdu language television channel in Pakistan, a country where polio has yet to be eradicated. Many communities have yet to be immunized; vaccination teams are sometimes unable to reach remote areas, or parents themselves refuse the vaccination drops for their children out of misplaced fear because of a lack of information or for religious reasons.

SAMAA’s Polio Control Cell, set up with UNICEF and the Ministry of Health, will help the health authorities reach out to the most vulnerable communities and include every child below five years of age in the national polio vaccination programme.

After SAMAA and the government and UNICEF teamed up, 14,500 complaints were recorded and managed by the television channel, as a result of which 22,000 children, who otherwise would have been left unvaccinated, were tended to.

In their bid to eradicate Polio from Pakistan, UNICEF and the Ministry of Health vaccinate almost 35 million children after every 60 days.

SAMAA’s Polio Control Cell was discussed as an innovative media initiative at the Stanford conference (May 18-20) which was attended by working journalists, media entrepreneurs and policy-makers in media and innovation, academic researchers, faculty and students in related areas of study and other professionals related to the innovation ecosystems across the world.

The Innovation Journalism conference, since its start in 2004, has become a global platform and meeting place for discussing the best ways of covering innovation in the news, the business of doing that work, and how innovation journalism interacts with society.

The media boom within the past seven years has led to growth of more than 70 channels with a majority of them focusing on news and current affairs in Pakistan. This has spurred on a largely young population to adapt modern ways of learning and keeping themselves aware.

The conference included keynotes on the crises and opportunities for journalism and workshops on Innovation Journalism best practices. The sessions ranged from the business models of innovation journalism to how to cover innovation - a 'horizontal' topic, crossing the normal production lines in the news room.

Among the keynote speakers were VINT CERF - Chief Internet Evangelist of Google, "Father of the Internet", CURTIS CARLSON, President SRI, G. PASCAL ZACHARY, Journalist; Vis.Scholar, UC Berkeley, MICHAEL KANELLOS, Editor-in-Chief, Greentech Media, ERIC ELDON of VentureBeat.

At the session of "Where is the Money?", Jason Pontin, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher, Technology Review, Thomas Frostberg, Senior Business Columnist, Sydsvenska Dagbladet and Amir Jahangir, CEO of SAMAA TV Pakistan, were the keynote speakers. The session was moderated by DAVID NORDFORS, Executive Director of the VINNOVA-STANFORD Research Center of Innovation Journalism.

The news and media business models in Asia, specifically Pakistan, India, and Thailand etc. are not only intact but offer greater value due to a much richer demographics as well as young workforce, which consists of an emerging middle class.

Amir Jahangir, Chief Executive Officer of SAMAA TV, one of Pakistan's leading Urdu news channels, and other representatives of SAMAA TV, Shahray Zariff, Meher Bokhari and Fatima Akhtar, were selected as key presenters for the IJ-6 based on SAMAA TV's leading initiatives for the media's role in the socio-economic development of Pakistan through some of the innovative strategies, which have been benchmarked as global standards in communications.

"The Pakistani media has arrived, it is independent, evolving and becoming a platform for the entire nation's expression and hope," said Amir Jahangir, adding that media independence and its growing following and influence are not only bringing about a social change but a complete re-engineering of the entire societal structure.

"The media is consistently attracting investment, human capital improvement and audience/viewers participation. With more research, development of specific academic infrastructure, induction of technology and more innovative forms of journalism, we are confident that this sector will not only evolve itself but will also demonstrate the capacity to influence other sectors to grow as well.”

Jahangir concluded by highlighting the importance of the Asian region, sharing that it consists of over a third of the world's population, a population which is young, mostly between 16 to 30 years old and includes a set of emerging and still vibrant economies. Jahangir said that the future of the media in the Asian region is promising and hopeful and would play an important role in leading the world in to what could as well be the Asian Renaissance. Amir Jahangir is also a Program Advisor to the VINNOVA Research Center of Innovation Journalism.

Shahray Zariff, Executive Producer for SAMAA TV, spoke on the launch of the first program on Innovation in Pakistan, another leading initiative by SAMAA TV. Zariff shared that the objective of the program is to identify and highlight innovation initiations and processes relevant in Pakistan (which can range from technical, business and social etc.) and benchmark them against international definitions and standards. The program looks at innovation as a holistic process and highlights the link between technical innovation and its social and cultural impact. The program is produced in collaboration with innovation journalism fellows across the globe.

Fatima Akhtar, Senior Manager for SAMAA TV's Interactive Platform, presented SAMAA's vision for its interactive platform, that links innovation to new media development with the aim of uniting audiences and providing them with a platform whereby, they can initiate a healthy "dialogue". Apart from providing credible news stories to societies around the world, this interactive platform also allows audiences to share their content with SAMAA and the rest of the world. SAMAA is also creating its interactive profile as a Web 3.0 ready model. This will be one of the first initiatives from Pakistan in compliance with the Davos based World Economic Forum's WELCOME platform.

Capitalizing on the potential offered by new media, SAMAA's citizen journalism initiative i.e. iSAMAA aims to create content through collaboration and partnerships. One of the most significant milestones achieved through this initiative was SAMAA TV's collaboration with ALLVOICES.COM (a citizen journalism startup based out of Silicon Valley, an initiative of Innovation Journalism Fellow). SAMAA is also collaborating with a domestic citizen journalism portal: SeenReport (a startup out of Lahore University of Management Sciences). The uniqueness of the portal is that, among the different categories, there is also a beat on "INNOVATION" whereby, users can upload content relevant to this particular beat.

The objective is to allow citizens to come together and create a more effective communication among different communities thus, shifting their role of "consumers" to "innovators and content creators" of knowledge and information.

During the various presentations, one of the most applauded initiatives among the participants was SAMAA TV's innovative health communication programme for the Pakistan Polio Program, the "Pakistan Polio Control Cell". The presentation was given by Ms. Meher Bokhari, Senior Producer and Anchor of SAMAA TV.

This initiative managed a big challenge on the ground by empowering the media to play the role of a watchdog and pressure the health authorities to deliver on improving the health service delivery systems. Recently the initiative has also been recognized as a benchmark for future Polio campaigns around the world by the Global Director of the World Health Organization, Bruce Alyward, and Bill Gates, the founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, on their maiden visit of Nigeria this year.

Dr. David Nordfors, co-founder and Executive Director of the VINNOVA-Stanford Research Center of Innovation Journalism, reinforced the importance of innovation in today's global development by saying that, "for journalism to survive, it must succeed with innovation. Journalism needs to innovate to survive as a business, which means that citizens, students, workers, executives, all of us need to innovate in response to tectonic economic upheaval. Journalists have the critical and vital role of independent investigation, gathering and presenting news to increase general understanding of the engines of innovation".

The Innovation Journalism Program at Stanford also organizes the Innovation Journalism Fellowships, where each year a selected number of journalists mix workshops and conferences at Stanford with covering innovation in collaboration with hosting newsrooms. The fellowship program in Pakistan is operated in collaboration with the Competitiveness Support Fund, a joint initiative of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Ministry of Finance, Government of Pakistan.

Other than SAMAA TV, other media representatives from leading organizations from Pakistan also attended the conference including Sarah Hassan from AAJ TV, Nadia Zaffar of DAWN News, Shahzada Zulfiqar from the News International, Hamza Habib Farooq of GEO Television and Mubarik Zaib of DAWN Newspaper.

SAMAA TV, launched in December 2007, is the only Pakistani news channel, which is run as a corporate company rather than a family-owned business. SAMAA

Watch a SAMAA video on the polio campaign in Chaman, Balochistan