The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Jalisco, Mexico, from 5 to 9 December 2016. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> ELLEN BLACKLER: Good afternoon, good morning. Welcome to our session. We are going to be talking today about how to build capacity for local content creation of all sorts. I'm Ellen Blackler with the Walt Disney company. I have a fabulous panel here. I will introduce them a little bit as we go along. We'll be having our panelists talk for a bit about their perspectives and then we'll take some questions from the audience. We expect to have about half the time of the session available for some discussion with the audience. So I hope you're thinking of questions to ask our fabulous team.
We envisioned this session to really address the phenomena that has been documented recently with some good data on how many people have access to the Internet but choose not to use it. Of course, issues of infrastructure availability and affordability are critical, and we don't mean to minimize those, but today we're going to talk about the phenomena of people having access to Internet and not using it. And this is not trivial. There are estimates from the world economic forum that in the developed countries, 30% to 50% of the people who have access don't use the Internet and in emerging economies it can be as high as 70%, 75% of people with access aren't using it. And what is interesting is that when asked why they're not using the Internet, affordability is the third most cited reason. Instead people identify the lack of knowing that it has no value to them, they don't know what they would do with it or they don't know how to use it. So I think this is a very important fact for us to recognize so that we can start to address that part of the digital divide as well. And one of the things that is most interesting to me is that even in areas the areas of fundamental poverty and literacy are not in play, and higher income levels who have literacy offline, they still identify lack of relevant content and lack of knowledge on how to use the Internet as the most important issues for why they're not using it.
So what we thought we would do is look broadly at all of the contributing factors to what ends up having people not feel they know how to use the Internet. And today we're going to start with children in school and what we know about that issue and how it can be addressed. And go all the way to the issue of how we can promote the creation of professional content that TV shows, movies that people want to see, that represent more of a diverse and inclusive set of voices. So we will cover all of that today, which is a lot.
We're going to start with Marcela Czarny. Marcela is from Latin‑America, she's from Argentina. And she works with wonderful NGO that has put a lot of effort into training children on digital citizenship and the use of technologies and she's going to tell us about her program and her lessons learned.
>> MARCELA CZARNY: Thank you. I feel more comfortable speaking in Spanish. Sorry.
An organization NGO that related to right of children. From the point of view of technologies. Organization was created ten years ago as children website had a lot of relations children. So thinking about other problems.
At the beginning we thought about the security on Internet and why we thought about this. Back then when we were asked about projects involving children and technology we thought about the risks that children could face on Internet so we thought about a security Internet. We thought about the attackers, what we have to do in order to avoid attacks and we had to do in order to protect our childhood. Then we understood that that concept wasn't not enough. Especially because the children are subject of the law. They have an evolution throughout life and they can play on active role, the moment that we give them a mobile, they become responsible users or they have to be responsible users. We also understood that it was not all about risks. Also about the possibility of benefits and the interaction of children. Now we feel very comfortable with this idea if I can show this now we understand that the programs that we develop are related to corner stones. The digital citizenship in this case we talk about the rights and the responsibilities of children and teenagers in digital environments but not only children. But also the rights and responsibilities of other social players in the digital arena. Together we may get these digital environments have to think about programs and contents and children.
In order to be responsible user of Internet, we needed to allow children to acquire tools and skills pertaining to the development of a critical thinking, a solution of a problems, the development of content, expressing themselves by means of new technologies. These are two big corner stones are the ones that serve as a foundation of our content. And they empower children for today and the future.
A number of programs that we have developed all of our programs that have some content about these pillars. Children as subjects of law, for instance, they have a personality, they evolve throughout life until they reach adulthood. They have responsibilities and they have their own needs as individuals. And another corner stone that we have has to do with the promotion of diversity. We know that ICTs have big build, a big area so you can work with the other. Someone can be your colleague, your ‑‑ people with different religion from a different country, from a different socioeconomic level, all of our programs have cornerstone that has to do with diversity.
Another cornerstone, the participation of youth and childhood. We understand that throughout the development of the programs, we need to have the presentation of the voice of children. And this is an agreement sometimes we realize that the participation of youth, they simplistic point of view. ‑‑ takes simplistic point of view. Sometimes children have to comply with the needs of adults and they do not have a real participation. It is very difficult for us to understand the need of children or when we think about our project. Another corner stone. The government is very important whenever pertaining to the rights of children. But by itself, companies.
Use of technology. In order to understand this issue of three areas. It comes into gender perspective of the inclusion of women. These three problems are the following. Number one, the contents. We understand that contents media had affected ‑‑ new content on the digital world shows some other problems related to gender. For instance, what do children have to play, boys and girls and how girls can have access to content. They have best access than boys. So this is one of the most important cornerstones.
And now number two, the risks that girls have ‑‑ talking about risks that girls face texting pictures, and they cannot download them from Internet because Internet is forever.
Adults.
This can end up ‑‑
And then we have so they can ascertain we are going ‑‑ [ indiscernible ].
The dangers. By means of the technology.
At the end they end up with projects that are not similar to the expectations of adults. We also work with teachers. We train teachers and we also train parents. Because we understand it is a very difficult to reach all the teachers. We have online and offline materials. We also work with parents. Now I am going to talk about the future challenges. In the case of parents we have at workshops, we also have campaigns and materials for awareness creation. We also work with decision makers, that is to say, the state. Those who are expert in different fields of the digital arena. They develop the content, this year we concentrated on the gender perspective, we thought about the different problems we are currently living. We give this material to 30 private and public decision makers and then we have a meeting. And we create a report. A report that can be used in communication campaigns.
And lastly, the challenges that we have for the future. We do believe that we are still lacking the intersection that we saw on the chart. That is to say the intersection between literacy and digital citizenship. We have to work on strategies to attract the participation of the youth.
Our challenge is to have thinking intelligent users. People who understand that ICTs that can help us to replicate the world we live in with the hatred, with the separation, with the different divides that we've got. But they can also be used to create a better world with less discrimination, with less or with fewer digital divides. So for this world, we have to continue working. We have to continue working on our cables in order to develop our projects, in order to reach these superior stage. Next year I am going to propose another chart. I'm sure we are going to include other components, not only citizenship and literacy. Thank you very much.
>> ELLEN BLACKLER: I'm sure we'll have questions later. Right now I want to turn to Jimena from AT&T in Latin‑America and she will talk about some of their observations on how to advance the use of ICTs in schools.
>> JIMENA: Thank you, Ellen. What I like the most about IGF is the learning experience. So I paid a lot of attention of Ellen's remarks on Tuesday. She basically shared with us those numbers about why there's so many people who have access to the Internet, they are not using it. And without minimizing other factors, we saw the lack of interest of one of those reasons. So I've been thinking since Tuesday what could be our comments about it. And I think that we should really look at it because and talking and hearing about all the human right organizations who also attend IGF, I think it's fair to not take an approach that oh, they don't use it because they don't get it. I think we should be more respectful about the decisions of the individuals. So I would like to invite you to think about three things that I think we should take into account when we are talking about programs for projects to grow the demand. The first one is why the regular people should call Internet their own. And it's all about the appropriation factor. So how the Internet could become part of my of my day or of my life. I think that's one of the things that we should be paying attention. The other thing is that discoverability. There's a tsunami of contents out there and it's really difficult sometimes to find something appropriate for what I want to do with my life, with the things that I care the most.
And the third is really that we should think about the purpose of it. Why should I bother. So we talk about, for example, the lack of local content or the scarcity of Spanish content or other languages besides English. But I think we also have to talk about relevant content. And that's something that each individual has to answer for themselves.
So when we plan our CNS projects, one of the things that we care most about as a company as education, we took ‑‑ we really gave these three factors like a really good thought, because if it makes no sense to the people to get involved in this projects, it won't work. So we have a great program. I want to talk to you about it. It's a really complete program from the private sector using ICTs for application purposes. And we have presence in nine countries, escuela blues attends, and we work with 15,000 teachers to introduce these technology to their classrooms. And we train them and by peer‑to‑peer activities we've reached 65,000 teachers already. We have 1 million students benefit of this project, an we selected 500 hours that are helpful for the teachers to explain different lessons. It doesn't matter if you're talking about, I don't know, metamorphosis or you're talking about the solar system. It's quality content that helps them in their every day activities.
It's a partnership with the public sector to help in the provision of our relevant service. And I think this is one of the keys that could also help us to grow the demand. People care about important things. And education is one of them. And to attend rural schools and public schools is relevant for their future. So it's not something out there in the cloud or out there in the net, my school, my community.
We use state‑of‑the‑art digital technological with our friends, satellite TV, but it also could be used with digital platforms. And we attend rural schools across the region, in Chile, for example, we have 97% adoption in rural schools. So this is like a really robust program. And I think we are bridging the digital gap. Again, the affordability and the access is still a challenge and to work with these rural communities is very important. To have sustainability approach. And about the teaching technology and the training component, I think the other thing that we should take in mind is that digital skills work when they are combined with traditional skills. They're learning and the teaching activities can really be enhanced by the ICTs, but they cannot replaced. So I think it's an interesting combination of things. And the other component that we found really interesting, and these was a listening effort from our side is that a teacher, teachers ask us to have curated content. It's not when you have 30,000 hours of content and you have to plan your lesson for next week, it's really difficult to find everything and to know if that content is scientifically approved or relevant if it's updated since the creation of that particular video or clip. So we should take in account that probably we are transforming the way that the libraries are created. But the people behind the library was, I don't know if they were English ‑‑ the librarian this is important function.
We have technology in this situation. We also have screens within the classrooms. We have quality content that has been properly indexed, organized. So every teacher can find the material relevant for his or her lesson.
We have a call center, we have a group of what's up. And they can send us our question and help us to solve it really quickly. So this also helps teachers to grow in confidence when using the system. If you don't take care of the people using that technology, it won't work. Why we see this project as a private‑public partnership. Because in these eight countries we work with education minute industries. We sometimes it's easier to go around them. But it won't work. You have to talk and work with the ministries, know what they care about, what they care about, what are the curricula that they are trying to teach to the children and see which of our content can act to that learning experience. So I think that.
So as you can see we are attending the three aspects that I talked about previously. We are giving the people an opportunity to call this program their own. It's because it's in their school. It's my teacher, my friends in school. Contents that are relevant for the Latin American students. And we just paid attention of bringing quality content, curated content and with the tools needed to discover this content when you need it. And to fulfill a purpose. And we are really proud about it and I keep thinking about the phrase, who has a purpose will find a way. So our way ‑‑ to approach a very humble in a really respectful way with schools and with teachers around the region.
>> ELLEN BLACKLER: We're going to leave the children area for a little bit and talk a little about adults and how they're accessing the Internet Helani Galpaya is going to talk about her observations from the Myanmar experience.
>> HELANI GALPAYA: Thanks, Ellen. I think this question of why people are not online is really important and it's really important in the region we work in which is south Asia and southeast Asia. Because particularly in south Asia we have a region which has very low prices, surprisingly. Many countries have matched the affordability targets by the broad band commission, in fact even more affordable than that, that 5% income kind of target, supremely high penetration, good coverage for over I would say a decade now, but very low Internet penetration. 20% to 30% of the people online. And when we do the national household surveys, representative sample surveys across 11:00, 12 countries in this region, we still get the I can't afford it on why they can't get a phone and the second is I don't really need it. So they're both still there and I think that affordability even though I just said that connectivity is important, that phone affordability is one of the things we need to worry about because it's what type of phone. So when you look at like voice access, poor women and poor men there's lots of sharing of the phone for voice. But when it comes to Internet, Internet is a personal phone use.
The sharing is not in Myanmar last year when we did our national survey we saw among phone owners 66% of them had smart phones. Only 33% had feature phones like the key pad phones like we used to use back in the day. At that time 6 months after the market open up, 45% of their sims were daily Internet use of the Internet. This is huge.
Facebook and social networking content. So as somebody who works in development, I like to think that people when they get the Internet, they check market prices and get higher prices, they check education content, they check health and Google things. But in fact the dominant use is social media. That's just a fact. You just need to accept it. But social media is not a thing. But people do really diverse things in social media. They of course look at cat video, they commute with their friends, they share photos. They also increase their incomes. So like in our focus group discussions we talk to hair dressers who follow celebrities online and because customers come in and ask for those hair styles. This is directly related to income. We see it in housing democracy because last year when we had elections there was nothing else online other than the free Facebook. There's a lot more diverse use than we think about on Facebook and when it's given free it primes people actually use it when you look at Wikipedia, more important I think it has a priming effect because when people who enter and way more likely to use other ten tend on the Internet. And so I will actually end there because this is providing local content, locally relevant content in their local language and the priming effect of social network used is not to be under estimated. It comes with a huge amount of problems that we can have a separate debate about. But it does have positive and that should be a part of a strategy because use is on mobile and this is one of the most common used mobile applications. Thanks.
>> That was a great transition. I've worked in broadband policy for a long time back when we were trying to get people in the U.S. to adopt Internet access and we used to say that no one ever goes back. They don't start using the Internet and decide you know, that's not for me. So this idea once you get people to start using it, even if they're using it for entertainment purposes that really provides a gate way for them to use it for educational purposes, government access services, all of these things. So it's certainly a piece of the puzzle. We've talked about a user‑generated content that we see on Facebook and I think now we will turn to our esteemed group of professional content creators. You'll hear from them I think about how the how we can create that kind of professional content that is in other languages and representing diverse perspectives and what the barriers are and the opportunities. I'm going to start with Stuart Forrest who is with us today from ‑‑ we're going to do the slides too. So maybe we can start working on getting them up there. Stuart has demonstrated real leadership in vision how to grow the content creation community in Africa and give young story writers to get their stories heard so we'll hear from Stuart and we will hear from colleagues.
>> STUART FORREST: I'm a film maker, I'm not used to this kind of conference. I don't know what you're doing for three days. I can only understanding half of what you're saying anyway. Trigger fish is the largest animation studio in Africa and I think we might be the most widely distributed film company in the emerging markets across all media. I stand to be corrected, but we've generated over $80 million in gross revenue of the last five years. And we've played in cinemas in almost every country in the world. So I think we really have we're 20 years old so it hasn't been an overnight success, but we've managed to crack it as I say.
As history, trigger fish has been around for 20 years. We started doing service work for Sesame Street and we started with the south African version of Sesame Street and it worked so well that we ended up developing the same concepts for the domestic and the internation versions of Sesame Street. And what we brought that was quite fresh and that sesame workshop really liked was we went into our own communities and found local craftspeople to produce images that were quite fresh. And then we worked closely with the sesame workshop educators and directors in New York to bring their experience connected to our fresh talent and our fresh new voice and it responded really well and internationally it became quite a successful part of sesame animation. And we ended up doing 10 seasons for them before they decided not making scenes for us. But as film makers, I think most film makers are going to tell our own stories and so the stories that we started to develop our own feature films and the first feature film we released in 2012 was screened around the world. The slide show some of the posters that not all of them it was dubbed into 25 different languages and did really well and the second one was released a year later, also very successful by African standards. Certainly the most successful African film of all time. And that's because animation travels and it plays in every country. Our best territory is China, Russia, Poland, France, Mexico and we have done very well by African standards. But at the end of that process, we recognize that the scripts development which we had spent maybe $30,000, $40,000 doing couldn't compete with the crypt processes at the major studios which is in multiples of millions. So we took a few years off to really try and develop our script department and that's when we started working with Disney, who saw the opportunity to raise local voices and so we had this program called the story lab which was a competition of sorts to find the best writers on the continent after running TV commercials in 36 African countries we got applications from all over the continent and we had 1,400 projects to choose from, of which we choose 8 and this picture is that eight in Burbank at Disney lot where we could understand and be exposed to some of the development processes they ran at Disney. And out of that has come this four TV series and about six feature films that we're now in development on. And of those four TV series we have now got interest in every one of them from the big TV markets. So it's really a great success story. That said, even with nearly $80 million of gross revenue, we still haven't seen $1 of that. We're not ‑‑ we're still struggle to go write scripts, we're still struggle to go raise money. The market has really failed even the most successful and this means that the emerging markets are not given a voice in the world entertainment stage. And we have now started a new initiative which is about stimulating animation throughout the continent and in terms of competitions and whole bunches of other things. But the real problem is the market for development is not there largely because the we've just not seen a way to monetize the work that we produce and that's a real problem for independents. It's not so much a problem for the studios, but it is really a problem for new voices to break out because the monetization of the product is very poor. Thank you.
>> ELLEN BLACKLER: We'll talk more about that in the discussion phase. Let's talk to Malenga who is one of the winners from Stuart's story contest. Hopefully we'll get her artwork up here soon. She has a story she has envisioned that she would like the world to see and also her experience in trying to get her show produced which you will see very shortly.
>> MALENGA MULENDEMA: Thank you, Ellen. It's interesting that I'm sharing my story here because it all started on the Internet. So I was sitting in Zambia just about to give up trying to be a script writer, director, producer and I said I'll give it one more try by going on to the Internet and following as many people as I could follow, trying to watch as many movies as I could watch. If I couldn't watch the movie watching the trailer online. And being envious of other opportunities that people were getting especially in the western world. And one of the many platforms I had joined I came across a call for concepts from trigger fish. And I knew the quality of work they had done. So when I saw the concept I had to go back to terms and conditions. They say Africa I was wondering did they say Africa, is this open to the whole continent. So like any other sane script writer I procrastinator for days and days. The struggle was what story am I going to tell, I was thinking coming from Africa, you think about okay, precolonial times. You think, okay. That was our best time when we were kings and Queens and warriors. But because I was procrastinating I didn't have time to research. We can imagine the future but I didn't have time to think about the technology and the science. I only have now and at least I'm very familiar with the times now. So the story would be set in modern times. When you look at Africa the narratives it's always problems so I had to look and say why am I afraid of telling stories in present‑day Zambia. So that helped unlock the key to what my concept would be. But my biggest inspiration was looking at who is the audience going to be. Of course the concept say they wanted stories that could travel internationally, but I was thinking about African children and whenever they take center stage, they're selling or presenting things that devastating like poverty, abuse and other things like that. But then I wanted to do something different. So I thought why not make it as fun, as crazy, as wacky as possible. I not only have them take center stage on these things that are bad and sort of just make you sad. So I thought about, and the best genre for this was the super hero genre. Because with that, it's always the underdog who gets an opportunity, some power or just something that makes them want to change the world or save the world. And Africa is never serving the world. We're the ones who have always been destroyed first. So I thought what about Africa saving the world. Super heros from Africa saving the world. But I didn't want to give them too much. So I said okay. It's like the start‑ups. May not have all the capital, all will resources but you use what you have. So basically it's four African girls and they're recruited by this old lady who used to be a spy. And basically they're trying to save the world on a budget but they make it happen. So they just keep losing. So basically that was my concept. So even the work with trigger fish's call for proposals, while back in Zambia I was able to do it was work the concept asked you had to tell what's the story, who are the characters and I submitted it three times and waited and they said they would announce or they mentioned some days so I was there refreshing my Facebook page for minutes and minutes. And then I didn't see anything. And sort of almost forgot about it and I got a call from one of the producers who said we are going to fly you to South Africa to participate in one of the workshop there. So I think it was November 2015 I went to Cape Town, South Africa and met the Triggerfish team and one of the things I liked about that was it is an opportunity coming from another African country. And also the fact that they were building our capacity. So it was an opportunity not only just built capacity, in Africa they're always building the capacity but the opportunity never comes to do the work. It's very difficult to get the opportunity. But I like the way they structured everything. So you were interacting with creative people in South Africa. So you're meeting people who are creating different types of content. I think on different platforms and many of them have their work online as well. So meeting those people and seeing what they were doing was an education in itself, the workshop was an education in itself. And so then when I got there Disney had also given their input. Some of the work that got submitted. So when you got there you were learning and refining the work. So going back I had to redo the concept, make it better based on the notes that we had been given. And I was admitted and I got a call in December saying you're going go to Disney. Your work has been selected as part of the eight. I think in January or February we flew to California and got to Disney just I think approached for something they never take people into that whole world to understand how animation works. So we got to ‑‑ so I kept wondering if Walt Disney was alive. The man is dead but his vision still lives on. Up to this point. So that was a fun experience and so coming back to Zambia, that was in late February, I think. So from that point up to say October, I was working with the team in Cape Town. So I was back but the team was in Cape Town we were going through the concept development in terms of the artwork and also the story. And every week I was getting something via e‑mail and we were working on the story, also the characters and the story and the artwork. The fact that we were using artists from South Africa, Nigeria and Zimbabwe. It was fun seeing these characters come to life even if it wasn't animated but at least the illustrations, every time they would come in I would be so overwhelmed seeing this coming to life and I'm happy now I can die now and it's enough. But we had to keep going on. So it took me the Internet, that's what we used the most. We're never in the same room. So, e‑mail, and application, we can look at the designs and also Skype so I had my three sim cards, my three devices to make sure that the Skype would not cut and we kept going for I think nine to 10 months just working on the concept. And it has been a fun experience to learn and understanding you can compromise on quality so time has been ‑‑ we've had to take our time to create this and I'm excited to see what's going to happen as we go forward. Thank you.
>> ELLEN BLACKLER: It's such a great story we spend so much time here listening to people like me and we're pleased to have someone who is living this experience that we're all trying to create where there's opportunity for people all over the world to join the digital economy. So on this very high note about Malenga's experience, we're going to turn to Bobby who I think can help put in perspective some of the realities of that Malenga talked about about the amount of time and investment that it takes to produce the kind of content that people want to see when they log on. And what the barriers are to making that experience she's having a reality for more people.
>> Hi, I'm a film maker and educational content creator so it's a very difficult one to understand. It's interesting to be here to hear different perspectives. I'm one of those people who has strong faith in two things. A, the Internet and B, that content will always dominate our lives and everything else will follow by it. So today I'm going to talk to you about experiences not only film making but in the content space. Some years ago I was invited to give a talk at Howard business school. And I asked them for the teaching aid of a blackboard. They didn't know what it was. They gave me a white board and I wrote down four words on the white board. Engage, entertain, inform and educate.
So I believe that this is the exact order in which communication now happens. You can't actually enter this paradigm side ways. You have to enter from the top, because unless you engage and entertain, you can no longer inform or educate. I believed then and I believe now that is the order of communication.
Now having spent 35 years in creating, engaging and entertaining content, the last couple of years I've spent creating educational content and I've been involved in designing and creating not just the content for a museum because the entire building itself. Because the way we had the content there was no building that could fit it. It's a little different from what we've been saying see far. But the big realization was there was an entire generation which I believe was making its link from some of the traditional values that we were all brought up on. And I thought that the reason why this break was happening was not because the world has changed, but because communication has changed an the value systems have not been communicated in the way they should be. So I sort of did a fifth word to my four words I said engage, educate, inform and enlighten. So currently what we're deeply engaged in is creating a show. A show that uses projections, holography, 3‑D, what are we talking about? Five values. Gender equality. Secularity. Getting and sharing. Nonviolence and deep respect. I believe that young people believe in today but are not communicated properly. So what we did was we created, we designed this building and before the building was even coming close to being finished, I realized that what we have done is giving us 200 scenes to do five shows. That's 1,000 admissions a day. And now how do we make this travel. Because this is obviously a much larger thought than 1,000 people a day. So that's where the input came in. And they said that you know why haven't you thought of ‑‑ our thoughts are going.
Going to the domain we can take these values, yes we can take them to people who would otherwise not access them through any reading material or any other form they've been communicating with and perhaps move towards creating a slightly better and more enlightened world. So hope by seriously entertaining our audience, we will be able to envision core values using their aesthetic, their languages, their technology. And when I say young people, I'm saying children, youth, and my mom who uses Facebook and all of that. And she's 84. So that's the attempt. So I think I'm sorry I haven't faced that many challenges because I was lucky with my first feature film. It did very well and that helped us set up the basis for development and thinking about these larger things and I'm very, very optimistic about the use of the Internet in the future. Thanks.
>> ELLEN BLACKLER: Before we go to the finale which is all about the money, we will hear from Jimena about some film festival work to encourage Latin film development.
>> JIMENA: Thank you, Ellen. I'm develop we can relate to what Bobby and Malenga told us today, because it's really difficult when you are out there and you have these each to tell your story, it's like the artistic that of course I lack because I'm a boring lawyer. One of the things that is I felt in love after starting working with AT&T because it's a great way to promote interaction among people. Not only the young people who is starting to become a film maker, but also to the university communities who are paying attention of what's happening in the world. And they sense the need to tell their stories. And that remind me the concept that I was talking about earlier. Why should I care. And why should I call this thing my own. So a festival of university cinema and it comes with intellectual elements, but also with the production and the creativity elements that should be present in order to success in the film industry. So this is also a regional effort. I think it's very important that a Latin American countries or Spanish‑speaking countries interact with each other. I think that enriches all. But also to try to use the attention that audiovisual is a language by its own. When you put together people who is actually speaking the same language, amazing things can happen. So we use ‑‑ we promote digital tools. You know that everyone who has a cell phone now can become a film maker. If you have this incredible gift to know how to tell a story, really the technology is getting cheaper and cheaper and more affordable for many of us. So at the first that ‑‑ the first year that we created, we selected 30 short films. And ‑‑ sorry. And the idea was to again curate content. What are the best examples of Latin‑America film makers and films. And let's try to put them all together. And share with the community. So we include the winner of the cinema contest who basically runs ‑‑ it's part of these contents ‑‑ contest to win for scholarship in one of the most prestigious cinema and schools in the states. We also brought the film winner of the award of accomplishment of the United Nations alliance of civilization. So this is not the usual stories. This is also about relevant stories that are important for the university communities.
We selected movies from the festival who is also organized by United Nations. We put together the work of ten different countries and nine different campuses around the region. So with all these great movies, we made a festival and the idea is these young film makers can also be trained or get the experience of different people, Oscar winners, Oscar nominees. So to enrich the experience. And to help them again to build the skills and the confidence that they need to succeed in an industry.
And of course the idea is to share it. So part of the festival is also with the use or with the help of Internet to have activities that can be streamed, that can be shared in social media, and the idea is to grow the next generation of film makers. And as Bobby said, it's only when you are able to engage and entertain people is really when the magic happens. So you can look for the information and if you know anyone who is participating in the creative industries that wants to be part of it. And also, Ellen asked me why AT&T is participating in these efforts. And I think for us it's really evident that the video is the future of Internet. On the other hand, the future of the entertainment industries is to go mobile. So it makes sense to put together everything and I don't know. It makes sense.
>> ELLEN BLACKLER: Great. Thank you.
So we've heard a lot about all the opportunity and I think earlier in the week there was a panel where Nicole who is here with us today and produces a great show called an African city, which everyone should go and purchase and watch, in her panel she was asked to sum up kind of the whole discussion what do we need and she said I need money. So we now have with us today a venture capitalist here in Latin‑America and he can talk about what the money men look for when they're hoping to promote content.
>> Thank you. So, yeah. First of all, I'm going to talk a little bit from another perspective from the kind of investor side. So I am not the one making the decisions, so it's kind of difficult. But I've seen the struggle with creative entrepreneurs trying to raise money. Because what we do, first of all, let me introduce a little bit of what angel ventures does. We are a venture capital fund, and also an angel investor network and I run the office here in Guadalajara which right now consists of approximately 90 investors. Surprisingly enough Guadalajara is a city very well‑known for its creative talent. I've seen a lot of very talented entrepreneurs in this area. And I think all the projects I've encountered are really amazing and they have a lot of potential. But when you're talking about investments and once I learn how these funds work, you understand this is a risk mitigation game in which you have to consider all your portfolio as a whole and you always have to think about risk. And the thing about creative industries, for example, in my case what I've seen the most is video games or movies, for example, animated movies, is mainly two things that I've seen. One is that entrepreneurs come and they want you to participate in only one project. So we've heard that a lot. Instead of telling you okay, invest in my company in the animation studio as a whole, just invest in this project. And I think that is a mistake. Because when you think about it, people here know more about it, it's not an overnight success and it's difficult to know which of the projects of the studio is going to be the successful one. So as an investor, when they come to you with this approach, of course it's difficult to know if the market is going to be right for this project.
And even the ones that offer the whole project or the whole animation studio, it's also a very risky industry. And it's very binary because it either goes like a home run or it fails. And that's kind of what venture capital is in a sense. But if you add more risk to the equation, it gets more complicated. So I think one of the main problems with entrepreneurs is a problem because investors tell them okay, you need to come with a more developed plan or a more developed project to see the potential, but they tell you okay, but I don't have the money to do that. So completely understand the struggle and I think what one of the options I've seen or the things some studios make is go and ask for government grants. And maybe those government grants that sometimes are in a sense easier to find can take them to point A to point B and then in point B they might be more interesting for an investor. But in summary, I do believe it's a very complicated industry for venture capital because of the risk it involves. But I surely think there is opportunity. And I've seen, for example, we as a fund, are industry agnostic so we're not focused only on creative projects. We see a lot of things. But here in Guadalajara specifically I've seen funds that specialize in content creation, in digital content. So I see there are opportunities. I also see the risk. But I always only trying to encourage to stretch their own resources as much as possible. And bring to the table a project that is well‑developed and that the risk has been mitigated as much as possible so that an investor can really take a look at it and invest in it.
>> ELLEN BLACKLER: Okay. We've covered a lot of ground. I do want to give a chance to folks in the audience to have questions. So if people have questions, start thinking about them and we'll do our best to call on you.
>> AUDIENCE: Hello. I'm delighted to see a distinguished panels of amongst others film and entertainment makers and I was absolutely struck by what she just said. The notion of partnerships and the online platforms it is in their enlightened self‑interest. That's the general point. I would like to direct a question at Stuart and Malenga. I think both your pitches were fascinating in terms of revealing how much goes on in your profession.
How do you see that being wedded in the long run to ensure in your particular case that African content can be made local and seen but if it's any good seen all over the world as some of the content is. Thank you.
>> STUART FORREST: Thank you. I think it has to be market rich. I think if there was a market, the product will find its place. I think for us the development is an investment in the company. It's a balance sheet investment. The issue comes down to the business modeling. It takes an enormous hit to generate even its money back. We can try harder and harder to make bigger hits but the real thing is we haven't quite found what's kind of replacing the myth of the long tail, the myth of the mediation of the distribution platforms and what we're doing is we're facing a market that's really depressed and really cinema only and there's nothing down stream.
>> One of the things that struck me is the important role of partnering with government and business together to do some of this. I think Marcela you talked about it in partnering with the schools and you guys have had some relations with government sources as well.
>> I think ‑‑ this it's easy to make a program without a government but you have high possibilities to try to be a failure because a government sustain the way teach to the schools, the teachers and then can make your work to be sustain in the time. So for us it's a very important branch. Sometimes it's difficult but we go along with this objective and we don't develop programs if we haven't got some push from the state.
>> I would like to talk about something completely different, but it's also one of the CNS projects. But here in Mexico we have a program in partnership with the Mexican government. In which the equivalent to the Noah in the state, the water people who is monitoring the climate, the weather, they send us alerts when they see a hurricane coming to the coast. Really extreme weather. So we as a company have the way to bring that information to that specific community that it's in danger. So again, it's about why this is relevant to me. And of course we can't do that because the government has different capacities that the ones that we have as a company. But people after running this project for a few months, the commercials that the government used to promote these partnerships, portrayed the fisherman saying that he has the confidence to know if the weather is good enough for him to go out to the sea. Or to take his boat to the shelter. And this is like his most precious valuable thing in the world is his boat. So this gives you an example of how technology can help regular people to do amazing things when they have the opportunity to have relevant information. So most of us are not using radio anymore or TV. So if you want to, for example, last year we have the risk that having important slots during the night, no one is watching TV at night, at least we shouldn't. Or listening to the radio. But if you receive a message on your cell phone, for sure you're going to read it. So I think we need to learn to how to create value with the private and with the public sector too and the scope of things that we can do together is like really, really broad.
>> I just wanted to pick up on the theme of mobile and video content, and I think that's absolutely important. And also the financing and who are the important people at the table. Because when you look at south Asia and southeast Asia mobile yes we do entertainment, et cetera, but somewhere in between the content creator, even if it is people putting stuff on YouTube or something is this thing called the app. In my part of the world people are no longer using browsers. It's an app. And the creation of that app and the marketing of the app is a big part of who gets to play in the content. So we have quite cheap development in India and it's literally a longtail market, lots of new apps coming but very few rising to the top and becoming mass adoption and that has to do with marketing and mentoring of those young app developers. So they come for skill, they stand outside like 3,000 standing only rooms to learn how to do an app. But then they die down because they need the next step. And the success stories are when financing, particularly mobile telecom operators who pick the ones that they like and give them some visibility. And they become a huge conduit for content that their local communities actually create.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you. One question directed ‑‑ my name is Nicole, I'm a TV producer based in Ghana. One question directed at Stuart and Mr. Venture capitalist. Stuart, I saw that the story lab I think you worked in partnership with the department of trade and industry, they were involved. So as a TV producer based in Ghana, what's your advice to me in terms of how I should approach my government for help, assistance collaboration and even not just the government of Ghana but maybe regional and to Mr. Venture Capitalist, what should my pitch be to potential investors as a TV producer.
>> STUART FORREST: My answer to that, Nicole, is I go back 15 years ago I started an organization called animation South Africa which was an industry body that took for about 10 years to really get traction and then became a registered non‑profit and we raised funding and we lobbied and lobbied. And eventually we shoe horned the manufacturing incentive because the manufacturing incentives are much more established than the creative incentives of which they are now. That's how we got the involvement. Manufacturing IP and they got confused and he this thought we were making stuff. That's how I pitch it to government, that you are actually manufacturing something and trying to fund manufacturing incentives and try to use that language when you speak to them, it's the same as a factory that does this and builds this.
>> DIEGO MOLANO: Before answering your question, there's another thing that I would like to say about opportunities that I've seen developing here in Mexico. And one is actually very related to content and multimedia. I don't know if you've heard about the company but it's a silicon valley based company which deployed most of its engineering team to Guadalajara and all of the management and administration was in Silicon Valley and I think those kinds of combinations are also very attractive adding to what you are saying because you can always develop apps with enormous talent, cheaper cost in developing countries and you still have the access you get from Silicon Valley. So that's one of the things that for investors might make a lot of sense. Going back to the page, I think I mean the page basically covers the team, the team, the project, the business model, the basic stuff. But I think in this industry in particular, one of the things I would suggest to do, like very strongly, is to let investors know how can they exit the investment. Because these funds have a timeline and for you it might be your life project. And you might see this going for the next 30 years. And that's awesome. But these investors, they need to know how are they going to get out. And it adds to the thing when is your hit going to take place. In two years, three years, five years. And most of the funds that I've seen have a timeline of around 10 years. So if you can convince them that in the next 10 years you can have a big return on the investment, that's something you really should tap on. Other than explaining the team and business model and everything. Thank you.
>> ELLEN BLACKLER: Other questions? I have one, if other people don't.
So we've talked about money. And what government can do on money. I'm also kind of interested in terms of national policies that governments can have that help or hurt, in terms of legal frameworks and what other things are helpful to this area. I don't know if anyone has anything to add.
>> I was listening to that question about how to approach governments. In India, three industries have a disproportionally high tax, alcohol, tobacco and entertainment. And we pay 33% of gross revenues of ticket price to the government so that watching the film is considered a sin by our founding fathers. What it has actually done is built a very lean and resilient industry. And my advice is stay away from the government. I have a very strong belief that if you give a perfectly normal person a crutch for three months, when you take away the crutch, they'll start limping.
>> HELANI GALPAYA: I would add telecom in Sri Lanka because we just up to 42% taxation on our bills. We can't figure out if it's tobacco or if it's something we should encourage Internet adaption. So just to one of the main things is one is payments for content creators. The fact that Sri Lanka doesn't allow pay pal into the country. Is a problem. The dominant platform is not legal in the country and they end up finding other ways which take away a huge proportion of their income away when they need to cash out. Second in a country like Myanmar, something as mundane as funds is a problem. That's the kind of platform stuff that the government really needs to bring the right kind of people and play. Because it's fundamental to content.
>> Do you have local content in Myanmar?
>> ELLEN BLACKLER: I think we have time for one more question before we exit this market. Or people are ready for lunch. Oh.
>> AUDIENCE: At the risk of overstepping the boundary, for those who are interested, my organization, the international fed ration of film producers, our organization has produced a simple manual explaining what they have to do to get these wonderful films and series off the ground, using the infrastructure and financing. I have a few copies with me so please come to me afterwards if you want one. It's a very simple, down to earth explanation to what it takes do what they do. And also you can go own line on our website fiapf.org. And you will find it as PDF freely available.
>> ELLEN BLACKLER: Okay, thank you. I think we're done. Please give my fabulous panel a round of applause.
[ Applause ]
[ Session concluded at 1:30 ]