The World Summit on Media for Children, Kuala Lumpur 2014
The summit, which will be held in Kuala Lumpur, will be a two-day conference kick-started with a day of workshops on the 8th September. As the first to be held in Asia, it’s being organized by the Asian Pacific Broadcasting Union (ABU), Radio TV Malaya (RTM) as well as The World Summit on Media for Children Foundation.
The World Summit movement was initiated by Dr Patricia Edgar, who then headed The Australian Children's Television Foundation. They hosted the first summit in Melbourne in 1995. Since then the summits have visited the UK, Greece, Brazil, South Africa and Sweden. The aim has always been to exchange ideas and experiences, build alliances and create a worldwide community of common interests, so it’s really exciting that this summit will be hosted in a culture quite different to that of the places it’s been before.
All the summits have brought together practitioners, academics and experts in kids’ media from all over the world. They focus on the need for quality media for kids and the problems of providing this, but each summit also has a character of its own, influenced by the situation in its own territory.
The Kuala Lumpur summit will 
have a strong emphasis on the value of media in education, and in relation to social responsibility around issues like Aids, child trafficking and violence. There will also be sessions on storytelling in the Digital Age; the uses and abuses of Social Media; interactive media and games; funding and co production; policy and regulation - as well as the ever present concern of how to raise the profile of kids’ media, locally and internationally. The full programme and list of speakers is yet to be announced, but you can get more details of the upcoming summit and those of previous years from the World Summit on Media for Children’s website.
This is a great opportunity to get a perspective on a part of the world where children's media is developing very fast, and to learn more about production and policy in the region, not to mention a brilliant opportunity to meet other content makers and broadcasters from all over the world. Register today!
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