Mark Chalmer Discusses Water and Sanitation Projects and Modern Communication Tools (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: I'm Mark Chalmer, I'm a co-founder of Aclu, and I'm also a producer of Watercube.tv. I'm here because I was invited by Julie from Thomson Reuters, who I met at Stockholm World Water Week this summer, and that's a big international development conference full of people who are doing really useful stuff to do with water and sanitation infrastructure in the developed world. We're doing a lot to try and bring the water and sanitation projects online, and wider international development projects, but Aclu builds internet and mobile phone tools that make it easy to bring status updates online for very large numbers of projects. I was on a panel, so you never know what being on a panel is going to be like, and it was fun. There was quite a lot of people arguing about social media and its role, and I sort of find that a little bit... These are just modern communication tools that we just need to get over and get with the programme. We just need to get on and embrace these tools. I think that there was definitely people in the panel and in the audience who were from organisations that have grown up in a previous era, and they were designed to operate in a previous era. I think it's going to be very hard for some of them to adjust and adapt, but that's kind of what my job is, is to help those kind of organisations really think, wait a minute, why are we sending film crews to a couple of programmes in Sierra Leone? Why aren't we just working out how do all of our staff in Sierra Leone publish, describe what they do online as they do it? That's kind of the world that I'm in. I was talking to somebody the other day about how the West, the North, whatever people want to call it, the developed world considers the developing world, and there's so much... There's this perception of Africa, Africa's this continent that's been built up over the time, but British perceptions of Africa are just a set of perceptions. They're not actually really what it's like. And I was saying to somebody, don't treat the Netherlands or the UK as the real world, and then this other world is this sort of alien place. That's the real world. That's the world that's changing really fast. Us guys here in London, we can't get to grips with the change going on in the world. We're all just upset and we're in a recession. Whereas a lot of the people that I meet who are working in, say, Kenya, or in Bangalore, say, Nairobi or Bangalore, the world is just exploding for them at the moment. There's so much opportunity, there's so much change, and everybody seems to be really engaged with it. Whereas here, it's just everybody's like, the blackberry won't work. It's like the world owes us a favour. Whereas that's not the world that I'm seeing in the kind of people who are working on projects that we're involved with throughout.