The Pros And Cons Of Unicef Commercials

Imagine that you’re sitting at home one evening and your program cuts to commercial. One of the commercials that come on is a Unicef commercial. Before you have a chance to change the channel or move to another room, the advertisement is already telling you about the devastating living conditions of third world countries. But what if life in third world countries weren’t just melancholy music and sad eyes? What if these people have ways of finding joy despite the challenges of poverty? Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warned during her TED talk: “the danger of a single story.” Even though some people in third world countries are living in extreme poverty, they don’t all live a life of constant depression. The people of Haiti, for example, can find

My thought was that everyone was living in one room metal shacks, everyone was weak and starving, and that people were desperate beggars. I had done research before travelling down, but the stereotype of poverty still won out against my research. Granted there were people who lived in shacks, there were people that struggled financially, and there were people who asked for money or things. But that was only part of the population. There were plenty of houses and apartments that Haitians lived in. There were plenty of people who had business start-ups or had other jobs working for clinics and the tourism industry just to name a few. And although there were people who asked for things, they weren’t desperate, they just knew they could get hand-outs from the American visitors, and a firm but simple “no” would be enough for them to stop. There is a sort of culture shock from being in America and then going to a place like Haiti. However, the people in Haiti certainly aren’t living in a Unicef world. The commercial is intended to inflict guilt on the viewer so that they will throw money at the issue. But that just feeds the stereotype. There are other ways to support impoverished people without training the people to become dependent on first world country

Adichie remarked about her life that “to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” The stereotype of poverty only covers one portion of the people. And I only used Haiti as an example! There are plenty of other countries that have to deal with this stereotype; there are many other countries that, when mentioned, typically invoke sympathy. This stereotype has blinded us to the point where any view other than Unicef’s image of poverty is almost unthinkable. And that’s sad. It’s sad to think that the popular view of third world countries is a life of depressing living. It needs to