River blindness is a crippling disease that affects people who live at the margins of society, where they don’t have access to clean water, proper medical care or the preventative treatment Mectizan that is donated by Merck.

The work of non-governmental organisations like Sightsavers is key to helping strengthen national health systems in their response to neglected tropical diseases.

This film looks at the power of a truly symbiotic relationship between NGO and State as the strive to eliminate River Blindness from Nigeria.

Kate McCoy from Sightsavers said of this film: “It’s absolutely brilliant, the footage is stunning and the partnerships and different players in delivering oncho work come across so well – congrats!”

Stamp Out Oncho is a campaign idea that Cloud9Media came up with on behalf of the Mectizan Donation Programme, to galvanise ministers of health around Africa to take an interest in eliminating the crippling and unnecessary disease, onchocerciasis or River Blindness.

The success of the campaign, to get everyone to take Mectizan to protect them from River Blindness, has been enabled by village health workers like Edoa Pierre, one of many community drug distributors who travel miles and miles to deliver Mectizan in communities around Cameroon.

Getting people to stand up and take action is at the core of the Mectizan Donation Programme’s remit. Especially when the intended audience are Ministers of Health in African countries. This is the first of a series of films intended to get key influencers to commit to putting their name to a 30 year-long elimination programme – ridding Africa of River Blindness or onchocerciasis. If we work together we can stamp out oncho!

We used a local fixer to go in search of stories that were set up in advance of our shooting producer director’s arrival. We then worked with a wonderful local photographer and camera assistant to create a more integrated team and integrate more in to remote and challenging settings.

It started off a relationship with Cameroon and Nigeria that continues to this day, adding to the list of the many African countries that we have ties with.