By IANS,
New Delhi: A four-day conference being held in the capital plans to create a fusion of education and entertainment to spread awareness on various social issues, officials said Wednesday.
The ‘5th International Conference on Entertainment Education (EE5)’, to commence Thursday, is the first to be held in Asia.
Susan Krenn, Director of the Centre for Communication Programmes at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, one of the organisers, said: “Regardless of the medium, EE has the capacity to touch people’s hearts and emotions and effect lasting change.
“Our decades of experience have shown that it works,” she added.
According to organisers, the conference will bring together well-known artists, government officials, media experts and academics from over 20 countries to showcase how a mix of education, entertainment can change lives.
This year’s conference, focused on women and children, would aim to help India improve its development indices, especially those related to maternal and infant mortality.
According to Sandra de Castro Buffington, director of Hollywood, Health and Society (HH&S), a program of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Norman Lear Center, said they have been inspiring Hollywood scriptwriters to highlight social issues.
“We provide them with real life case studies so that those can be included in the show or a movie and in turn spread awareness about a disease or help in bursting of myths,” Buffington told IANS.
“We are in talks with producers and directors in Mumbai to commence a similar initiative here. We are also planning to set up base in the country,” she added.