YouTube – provider of daily entertainment for Internet junkies everywhere. So why not harness that power for other causes than sharing drunken karaoke sessions or funny ads? If you have the will and a videocamera, why not take up the World Food Program’s challenge to create a video to help educate the online community about global hunger?

The World Food Programme (WFP) and YouTube have a viral video competition going on which they’ve artfully called Hunger Bytes. The aim is to get the message, that people out there are starving and need help, out to the online community.

“For those of us doing the day-in, day-out backbreaking work of getting food to hungry people, it’s sometimes discouraging how few people understand that hunger stalks and kills a child every five seconds,” said Nancy Roman, WFP Director Communications and Public Policy Strategy.

All you need to do to join is submit the video to WFP. That isn’t the end of it – the five best clips (30-60 seconds in length) will be shown on YouTube. The winning video will be the one with the most views by World Food Day which falls on 16 October 2008. So participants are encouraged to link to the video through as many mediums as they can think of – MySpace, Facebook, personal webpages for maximum exposure.

The winner will win a trip to one of WFP’s relief operations and given the chance to film there. To get the full lowdown on participating, head on over to YouTube’s site at www.youtube.com/hungerbytes or the WFP equivalent at www.wfp.org/hungerbytes.

It remains to be seen if this Internet campaign will achieve the visibility of similar efforts by the Make Poverty History coalition. But heck, we don’t often get to say the U.N. and YouTube in the same sentence and context. All power to amateur filmmaking with a conscience.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, November 22nd, 2007 at 9:05 am under Online video, YouTube.

Read more entries by Erna Mahyuni.
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