Good evening, everybody. Hey. OK, so my name is Rob Tao, thank you so much to Fox for this invitation to to talk to you about a labour of love.
Now this presentation has nothing at all to do with my Ph.D. research or even my post-doc research, which is great.
It's about a labour of love that I've been working on for about six years now,
and what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk to you, talk through my two children's books by and gyda.
I'm going to tell you why I decided to write these two children's books and sort of
the transnational national and global outreach that I've done across the globe,
not just in the continent of Africa, but across the globe.
And then I'll end up with some conclusions in terms of future outreach that I'm going to be doing in the very, very near future.
So bye, bye and jot are to anti-corruption children's books, and I have a friend who says it just to me.
Only you, Rob Tell, would write an anti-corruption children's books.
Only you would conjure up something like this. And I think because he's the reason he says this is because I come from an activist background.
But what I discovered in in terms of thinking about corruption and thinking about
integrity is that quite often these conversations are had in adult circles,
right? We don't really think about how our actions impact of children in our lives,
whether they're our children or the children that we come in contact with who are in our ambit.
Right. The other thing that I think about is you think about folktales, right?
Folktales that we all grew up with in the continent that really teach us about virtues and vices.
Right? So I borrow from this tradition of the folktales.
But instead of using anthropomorphic characters, I use actual human beings and these actual human beings are children.
Right? So that the two books are basically about two characters twin characters Sun Mind,
Sun God who leave their port city of Buchanan, and they leave their port city of Buchanan and Liberia.
And they go and they visit their aunt and uncle, Auntie Marty and Uncle Mau Mau Mau in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia.
And when they go to the city, the capital city, they're super, super excited.
But they have a series of experiences and encounters that remind them of these two baso words.
Now, Bassa is one of 16 languages spoken in Liberia.
Two massive words Baba and JD now, but by loosely translated means corruption or trickery effectively.
But the way that I describe it in the book is not bribery or so forth and so on, not adult language.
I describe it simply as lying, cheating and stealing right in Jodha, which is the sequel to Babajide,
effectively means integrity, honesty and truthfulness, and the books are effectively about opposites, right?
What does it mean to practise bad? But what does it mean to practise Jodhpur?
Now, before I launch into my presentation, I'd like to read excerpts. What do you think?
So you can get a taste of the books? And this is why I've co-opted Jake and Yvonne to to show you the illustrations.
Because the books were published by one more book, which is a small niche publisher based in the United States and Liberia,
founded by Liberian artists in their own right right because they notice that there is a dearth of children's books that are
written for children in countries with low literacy rates where children can see themselves reflected in the narrative,
right? The books were also illustrated by Chase Walker, who is a self-taught Liberian visual artist.
He served as a political cartoonist in a number of local dailies in Liberia for a number of years and has since relocated to the United States,
where he can hone his craft. Now, Jordan, so, so excited to say, is in both Bassa and English,
and we co-opted a Bassa linguist by the name of Bishop Amos fÖr to translate the book into bass.
And I'll tell you a little bit later about why I decided to focus on a local Liberian language.
So without further ado, Jake and Yvonne, are you guys ready?
So I'm going to read from the first and basically to set the scene.
So the son of mine, Senegal, have arrived in Monrovia and they've been picked up by their auntie Marty, who is a big woman in the government.
She is actually a minister and they're sitting in traffic,
and I think this is an experience that we all have experience if you spent any time on the continent or outside of the continent.
They're sitting in traffic for hours on end and they're becoming really, really antsy.
Right. And the driver does something very interesting, which you'll find out in the book.
So the driver's name is open when IPOB drove to Vermont, my house and Tubman Boulevard.
Sun and Sun got stared in surprise. The long traffic lines of red, blue, brown and white cars went as far as the eye could see.
Like a chorus, the drivers began to honk together loudly.
Don't worry, Auntie Maria said. We will find a way out of this traffic.
Next page. When the traffic finally move forward, £o drove right to the police officer at the junction.
I'm very thirsty, the police officer said.
Standing between the cars and when I read this out to the children,
they've become really confused because they think, how does she conjure up that police officer's voice?
I want some cold water today in this heat up hot roll down the window slowly and help out his hand.
Sun Martin Sunday both noticed the clean one hundred Liberian dollar bill, which the police officer put in his pocket quickly.
He waved Opus Car through the traffic in a line that was not there before Sunday.
Man, son of God were confused by what OPA did and disappointed in the policeman's unfairness to the other drivers in Buchanan,
Ma and PA always reminded them that they should not jump in front of others in line.
OK, now in the spirit of opposites, I'm going to read an excerpt from Jai Dear.
So they're back in traffic again, right? It's a few days later they're back in traffic.
iPod drove along Tubman Boulevard to 15th Street, where the traffic stopped suddenly not.
The twins squealed, remembering Monrovia traffic only days before in Buchanan.
The traffic lines of red, green, yellow and white cars never went that far.
Most people rode pumpkins or fast motorcycles that sped over concrete and dust.
When Albert tried to create a third lane to escape the traffic, the driver in the car nearby warned Take time driver.
That police officer ahead is not easy. It's.
Now, this is my favourite scene in the entire book.
Auntie Marty, a motion for OPA to get back into the two lane traffic after one hour of moving at a snail's pace.
They finally entered the free flow of cars and saw why the traffic was blocked.
A woman police officer no more than five feet tall, was standing in the middle of the road, with her hands placed squarely on her hips.
Whenever drivers tried to create a third lane, she used sharp hand movements to get them back in line.
Has to be a woman and a feminist to the core.
What can I say? Sunday night and Sunday,
God noticed how she stopped drivers who tried to slip crisp Liberian dollars in the palm of her hands instead of taking the money.
The officer would direct the drivers one by one to the side of the road.
Each time she took out a notepad, wrote something quickly and handed slips of paper to the drivers Sunday.
I was curious what does that police woman doing on Maria?
She asked. Now, at this point, I pause and I ask the children what they think the policewoman is doing, and I get all sorts of responses.
But we'll flip to the next page. I won't ask you. Welcome to the next page and find out what happens to me.
It looks like she is giving tickets to the drivers who tried to create a third lane.
A. Maria said that woman officer is not easy on Midas and repeated,
unlike the policeman who tried who directed traffic on their first day in Monrovia.
This woman knew about John Day Sunday and Sunday.
I rolled down their windows and eagerly waved at her.
The policewoman tipped her cap in their direction and wait me asking me why Jada and bag about why anti-corruption children's books?
Why focus on children? So when I was in my mid-twenties, and in fact, immediately after doing the MSCI African studies with Jake,
I moved back to Liberia as a mid-level aide to the first democratically elected president, a woman, the first female elected president of Liberia.
What I realised in those four years of working with and for President Sirleaf is that corruption wasn't just about when you think about corruption,
it's always thought of in very formal terms, right?
So it's public using public influence for private gain or using entrusted power for private gain.
But what I realised and even social psychologists would argue, is that corruption really was a social norm, right?
It was embedded in the unwritten rules, the unspoken practises that people engaged in on a day to day basis.
Corruption effectively was enmeshed in every day human interactions I discovered in Liberia, right?
It wasn't just the public influence for private gain, but effectively lying, cheating and stealing every day.
This is how I describe it to children.
But I think what was interesting is because I saw corruption in the public sector and I saw corruption in the private sector
and I saw corruption in the media and I saw the corruption in the churches and the mosques and the informal private sector,
right? I saw corruption everywhere.
It wasn't until I had two encounters with adolescents and young adults that really shook my core of gravity, and I'll tell you about those encounters.
So the first was I was charged with the responsibility of basically overhauling Liberia's bilateral scholarships programme.
We discovered that people surprisingly enough, were selling scholarships to the highest bidder.
They were giving scholarships to their relatives, their girlfriends, their whoever, and they weren't going to the best and brightest in Liberia.
So the president called me in because I'd done a series of investigative reports for her, and she said, Well, what do we do about this?
And I said, we need to come up with a committee that will completely change the system that will completely make scholarships,
merit based, transparent as well as gender balance.
And as somebody who's benefited from scholarships my entire life, I realised that this is an important imperative, right?
So we set up a committee. It was an inter-ministerial committee represented by a number of different ministries and agencies in Liberia.
And we started to develop the process of people actually applying through a merit based, transparent and gender balance process.
Right. What we discovered is about four 18 year old boys forged their national exam records to become eligible for scholarships in Morocco.
And when we called them in to give them a sense of why they had effectively done something wrong,
committed a crime and academic crime, but also an offence and academic offence.
They had sort of normalised and said to us that they didn't think there was anything wrong with it.
In fact, the system almost 30 minutes to eventually confess that they had forged these national exam records.
And that was confusing to me because I thought, Well,
these 18 year olds are on the verge of adulthood and they have already internalised corruption as a social norm.
They've already realised that the only way to get ahead is through hook and crook, right?
The second encounter was teaching at the University of Liberia,
which was by far my most profound experience speaking to university students about whether or not giving a traffic officer a sum money,
as as you saw in the story, is a form of corruption. And the student said, No, it's not corruption, it's contribution.
And what they meant by that is, you know, low-level civil servants in Liberia get paid very, very little.
Right. So they were contributing to the salary structure of that traffic officer because they know very well that he can't afford to supply,
you know, his daily needs or to have his livelihood is constantly threatened.
Right. So they give a contribution every time they pass by him in order to help him live and survive.
And so, you know, supply his family's daily needs.
What was interesting about these are these two encounters, again, is that people at that age had already started to rationalise their dubious deeds.
So what I realised is that I really wanted to focus on kids because my my argument
is that young adults have already been schooled in the ways of corruption.
Right? They they think that it's the way to get ahead. By any means necessary.
Young adults as well as adults.
So what we need to do effectively is to build a new generation of integrity advocates a new generation of anti-corruption champions, right?
And to develop that moral compass,
social psychologists argue that children begin to develop an ethical core and a moral compass between the ages of eight and 10,
and there are some kids who even develop that much, much earlier on.
So that's basically the target group of these two books. The other thing I realise is that children are relatively honest,
and I say relatively because I've been called out by a number of parents who say, Have you ever seen a two year old lie?
So this this particular parent said to me that I had a very naive outlook about children, so I put that qualifier qualifier in.
Their children are relatively honest until we socialise them to be dishonest, and so we teach them how to lie.
So I have a story and you've probably heard this in your own particular cultural context,
but the story is there's a mother and a child at home, right? It's become urban legend in Liberia.
Folklore, there's a mother and child at home,
and the mother gets a knock at the door right and she looks to the people and realise this is auntie so-and-so.
And she actually doesn't want to talk to auntie so-and-so. So she hides and she tells the child, Tell Auntie Soto so-and-so, I'm not here.
And the child nods emphatically and says, Okay, mama, I'll go out the door, opens a door and says, Auntie so-and-so.
My mom just told me I should tell you that she is not here.
Now, come on. That's a funny story, isn't it? I usually get more or less than that,
but basically the reason I tell this story and the reason I think it's so informatique
of how we teach children to lie is effectively that child told the truth,
right? Told the God's truth that some of the children have told me my workshops right?
But that adult tried to convince a child to lie and the child just didn't have it in him.
He was very, very transparent about what the mother had told him.
The third thing I realise is that because we talk about corruption or anti-corruption in adult circles and we forget how it affects children,
that we forget also that children can also be anti-corruption allies, right?
That they can be our allies in this fight in terms of exposing corruption as a social norm
and perhaps changing those norms to reflect the kind of societies that we want to create,
right? Because I think we can cultivate that inherent honesty,
that that natural honesty that children have and what I call this is effectively a revolution from below.
So I hope you'll join me in this revolution from below. So what's my theory of change, right?
I think it's possible to reverse the socialisation process. We talked about the fact that corruption is a social norm.
Corruption can be taught, but it can also be unlearnt. Right? So we can reverse that socialisation process in terms of us training children,
how to lie in training to learn how to be dishonest by equipping children with
the verbal tools to really question the confusing ethical codes of the adults.
So effectively, we tell children to be truthful and honest,
but we're not truthful and honest in our everyday interactions, and children are so astute.
They pick up on those cultural codes even if we're not verbally telling them right.
And I think that by doing this, by reversing the socialisation process and equipping children with the verbal
tools to question the confusing ethical codes of the adult that we may enable,
we may be enabled to embarrass the adults into adopting more ethical behaviour.
Right. There's something about a child telling you that you're a liar without effectively telling you you are a liar,
that that does something about stabilising how you behave and how you interact with that child.
The other thing that I think is important is this particular revolution from below enables us to
frame children as the identifiable victims of corruption and what identifiable victims are clear,
clearly identified individuals who are affected by corruption, right?
Because when we think about corruption, we say, Oh, corruption hurts all of us, it hurts society.
But if you think about corruption is hurting your children or hurting the children in your lives,
I think it'll force us to think about how we live and practise on a day to day basis.
And then the last thing I think is important to realise a lot of people critique my approach and they said, Well, why focus on children?
They can't change policies, right? But for me, it's not about changing policy.
We have enough regulations on the books about corruption. Right? Do we enforce them?
No. When I'm interested in is changing values is changing practises is changing those social norms that we are so embedded in,
and I think children can be an important tool in doing that right.
So what are some of the methodologies that I've used, both informal and formal, and I think for me,
it's been a labour of love because it's been a labour of love collaboratively.
I've worked with so many phenomenal people, not only my illustrator, my publisher,
my translator, but a number of policy makers, as well as people who are in the arts.
So one of the things that I'm doing with these two books is I'm basically taking corruption out of its linguistic prison.
Now, I don't I don't know if you are familiar with in Google what the NGOs nineteen eighty six book decolonising the mind, right?
And in this book, Kenyan novelists and Googie argues that when African writers write in colonial languages,
they're effectively putting their ideas in a linguistic prison because it's not a language that they is their mother tongue effectively.
So what I'm doing is I'm taking the language of corruption so bad by anxiety or Bassa are in the best of language.
And I think most of us, if we say the word corruption, we find its equivalent in our language.
It has much more force. I think corruption has become such a clichéd phrase these days.
But think about how you say corruption in your own language and think about how much that carries a certain weight and a force that saying the word,
the English word corruption doesn't necessarily so.
For instance, in Liberia, when you say bad ba, I always like to say it, and then I laugh and I say, Ooh, say it again, but say it again.
When you say that to a Bassa language speaker, that person knows that that word is that bad thing.
That's how it effective. That's what it means in very, very layman's terms.
When you say the word, Jodha has a certain value as well, that integrity doesn't or truthfulness doesn't.
Right? The other thing is, I think it's important to use multimedia tools because a lot of children won't necessarily have access to these two books.
So the written text may be cost prohibitive for some people.
And so what I've done is I've worked with local artists in Liberia to create adaptations of the book into a song and a music video.
Now on your far left, you'll see the music video cover for gyda is integrity.
As a music video on a song that I collaborated with Tycoon J, who is a very popular social activist in Liberia, but also a Hip-Hop artist,
and he does a lot of songs around social issues in Liberia, around corruption and anti-rape and so forth and so on, and talk about nepotism.
He collaborated with with my younger sister Ella on Paly, who is a phenomenal vocalist,
and they came up with the song Jota's Integrity, which is an adaptation of the gyda book.
But I've also worked with local theatre, which is the local theatre troupe in Liberia, to create a radio drama,
five minute radio drama that's been played on about 60 for commercial, as well as community radio stations across Liberia.
And then a stage play with local theatre as well that features an all child cast.
Now there's something very powerful about children mimicking adults, right?
And as you see from the photos there, the traffic officer in the middle, in the middle photo,
this thing was probably the most for profound scene, and everybody thought it was really funny.
But it made a lot of the policymakers in the room think about how they engage in corruption,
how they use their entrusted power for private gain when they're in traffic. So, yeah, lot of theatre and I collaborated on that.
They got twenty five children trained within a five month period to put on this debut stage production.
What we're doing now is we're expanding the because it was focussed on bag by the time since Boggo was published in 2013.
We're expanding it to include Jodha, so it's back by and jotted the stage play, which will be debuted next spring in Monrovia.
And the idea is to take this play on the road to different regions of Liberia and possibly to a country or a city near you.
All of these multimedia tools are funded by the Open Society Initiative for West Africa,
and as you know, we'll see what does a lot of work on transparency and integrity. And they were the perfect ally to work on this project with me.
I also realised that it was important to work with the Ministry of Education
because my goal is to get these books in the national curriculum in Liberia,
not just in Liberia, but across the continent, because for me, this is a pan-African crusade.
Right. So I've worked with the Ministry of Education in Liberia to adopt both books as a supplemental reader for third to fifth grades.
I've also gone to Ghana, and the Ghana Education Service has also put the book on the Supplemental Reader list for third
to fifth grades and then effectively what I've also done pilots in 30 schools in Liberia.
We've worked with the Ministry of Education Curriculum team in Liberia to create a teacher's guide,
so the teachers have some activities to work with children in the classroom.
And for me, that's that sort of formal adoption into the curriculum.
And then the formal adoption in the teachers guide is an important way to spread the message of bug by anxiety across the country,
across the continent, across the globe. Workshops,
I think the workshops that I've done in 11 countries have been the most worthwhile
experience because it's given me a lot of fodder for possibly future books.
A lot of the children in the workshops will ask me, Miss Rob, tell us not is there going to be a part three?
And I haven't even thought about it as a possibility.
But now I'm realising that there's such a yearning and a thirst for these kinds of books amongst the children that I've that I've interacted with.
So I've done workshops in Brazil and Cote d'Ivoire and Jamaica, in Kenya, Liberia, Madagascar, Mozambique, Qatar, South Africa, UK and US.
And I haven't stopped. I'm continuing. So if you have any invites, please let me know after this presentation is over.
The purpose of this workshop. So the purpose of these workshops is really to be in a dialogue with children about the whys of corruption.
So why does corruption happen in the House of corruption? So how does corruption manifests itself in society?
And then, most importantly, what can be done about it? And for me, having the children talk about why corruption happens,
how it happens and what can be done about it for me is the most profound part of this experience.
So I have some quotes from different workshops that I've done across Africa.
There was a child in Kenya who said to me that we should all tell God's truth, and that was her description of God.
So God's truth is is unfiltered. God's truth is is on rationalise.
God's truth is the truth with a capital t as far as she was concerned.
In Liberia, one child said to me in Baquba, there are no real winners, only losers, right?
Such a profound thing coming from an eight year old.
And what I realised in the workshops is that children were absolutely preoccupied with the unfairness of corruption, right?
The injustice of corruption. And they talked about that a lot in South Africa.
Someone said jumping the traffic queue may cause an accident. Right.
So beyond just the sheer corrupt practise of actually paying a traffic officer abroad, this time I was thinking about the consequences, right?
So if you create a third lane, that could actually cause an accident, right in Mozambique,
one child said to me people who sell expired goods must go to jail and we're thinking about the consequences.
The boats talk about not only how corruption manifests itself, but also the consequences.
So what should happen to people who engage in corrupt practises? So these two pictures on your right from Kenya,
a young boy was answering a question and then in the middle is a workshop that I did in Madagascar with a number of children.
And as you can see, we did a bit a bit of a simulated exercise. A traffic officer,
I was pretending to be the traffic officer and I paid the young boy in the front or he paid
me some money so that he could move from the back of the line to the front of the line.
And when the children realised what what had happened, they were laughing. But then immediately they started to get very angry because again,
the injustice of just giving a police officer money to come to the front of the line,
it's usually the last person in line the sort of the penultimate person who gets very upset because now they're the last person.
In fact, in one workshop in the US, I asked the girl to give me money and she gave it to me and she came to the front of the line.
And then her friends were upset that she made it to the front of the line. And then I asked her, I said, Well, why are you in the front of the line?
She said, Because you asked me for money and I gave it to you. So, you know, the sort of instinctual.
A lot of other children have said that they would pay a bribe.
They were honest that they would pay a bribe because they don't like sitting in traffic in Nairobi for hours on end.
What was interesting about the experience in Nairobi is that a couple of days after
I had the workshop in Nairobi with the children at St George's Primary School,
I went to the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development the next day. And if you've been following Twitter, you probably know about what happened.
Basically, I was solicited.
The person who I interacted with at the K, I said because I was pitching the books as a possible supplemental reader for the new curriculum.
Ask me for two thousand United States dollars to do the assessment of the book, the evaluation of the book.
So what's interesting is that what I realised throughout this experience is that it's not just the children.
It's not just the children who need bugged by insider. It's also the adults.
Right? So a lot of adults will look at the book and say, Oh, it's a children's book.
It's benign, but it's not. If you read them, you realise that it really calls it calls to test adults.
It says that your actions, your behaviour, has an impact on the children in your life.
And furthermore, I believe fundamentally that children can be the moral compass of the world.
And in the book, the twin characters Sunday on Sunday are the moral compass of the book, right?
So it's almost an inversion of the social order. We often think that it's the adults in our lives who will teach us virtues.
But for me, I think sometimes it's the children in our lives who have the power and the capacity to teach us about virtues.
Right. So I'll talk a little bit about some of my future interventions. So I've talked about the children's all top task, the.
He has to take the all child task plate on the road once we combine the two books to schools,
to mosques, to churches, town halls, ministries and agencies. In something what we call the forum theatre.
How many people are familiar with the form theatre format?
So basically, Form Theatre is after the play is debuted, the all star cast lines up and we enable the audience to ask them questions.
And what they're supposed to do is respond in character. Right?
We did that. Would they debut in September? Twenty seventeen? And I was astounded by the responses that I got.
So one child from a local primary school stood up and asked the police officer who was playing the police officer,
the young boy who was playing the police officer, police officer. What do we need to do as a society to stop you from taking bribes?
Right? An audience member, probably 10 or 11 years old and the police officer said, increase my salary.
This is coming from an eight year old child.
So what this child had realised to that five month process of not only going through the theatre production
but understanding the difficulties that police officers face is that living wages in Liberia too low,
that corruption is also a function of poverty in as much as is a function of greed.
Right. So Form Theatre a really, really powerful tool. The other thing I want to do is I want to expand the pilots beyond just Man Cerrado
and Grandmaster Co. The pilots have been in two counties two regions of Liberia, to go to the three most populous country counties in Liberia.
So nimble, low fat and bong.
And then beyond Liberia, transcending Liberia is to take the pilots to different countries, beginning with English speaking West Africa.
So Ghana, Nigeria and then southern Africa, South Africa, Kenya.
I'm coming even even though they try to, even though they try to derail me, I'm realising that my friends are sorely needed in Kenya, right?
And the idea is to work with the ministries of education, the education boards in these countries,
as well as the anti-corruption agencies, because I think they're an important ally in this process as well.
And then again, ultimately translating the books into other African language and other official languages.
So I've been approached by House of speakers, by Swahili speakers,
by Malagasy speakers to translate the books into these local languages, in addition to the colonial French and Arabic and Spanish.
Last, but certainly not least, to adapt the books into a board game.
A lot of people have said there could be a bag. Banjara board game, even a TV animation and illustrator in Kenya,
has also approached me and said that he'd like to change the books or adapt the books into a TV animation.
So as you can see from the future, interventions by the anxiety are coming to a city, country and continent near you.
Thank you.