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.

This film was produced as part of a suite of material gathered on two trips to India and Zanzibar for use as an advocacy tool to support GSK’s donation programme. Having the children tell us their stories meant we needed to find confident speakers – no easy task in Zanzibar where traditionally young girls can be cripplingly shy. So we used a local fixing company to meet potential contributors, source the best stories and start to weave together a narrative that speaks to the heart – and the parent in all of us.

Back in the UK we translated interviews, re-scripted and looked to use voiceover artists from the local African and Indian diaspora of London. This helped keep the child’s voice at the centre of the narrative whilst avoiding the use of subtitles which can distract from the core action.

One in seven of the world’s population suffer from neglected tropical diseases. That’s more than the population of Europe. And yet, through large-scale drug programmes in some of the poorest regions on the planet, nearly one billion people are now safer from these diseases than they were half a decade ago.

This film celebrates the 5th anniversary of a groundbreaking international coalition: Uniting to Combat Neglected Tropical Diseases. Its aim is hugely ambitious yet highly focused: to control, eradicate or eliminate ten debilitating and potentially fatal tropical diseases by 2020. Here, we document some of the incredible progress so far.

The six-minute introductory film was shown to over 800 senior government officials and world health delegates at the World Health Organisation in Geneva in April 2017. Post event a revised version was created for distribution on social media. In total, we delivered 15 films to help share the positive impacts of this life-changing programme to a wider audience.