This is Kroo Bay

The best way to experience poverty in the third world is to be there. The second best way is to visit ’This is Kroo Bay‘, a online project from Save the Children UK. The website documents through 360 degrees images, video and text life for people in a slum in Freetown. Freetown is the capital and largest city of Sierra Leone. (see Kroo Bay on a interactive Google map)
Kroo Bay is built on pile of rubbish. Devastating floods ravage the community and bring deadly diseases - and most people can’t afford to pay for medicine at the rundown clinic. Kroo Bay’s children are dying needlessly. 1 in 4 children die before their fifth birthday in Sierra Leone.

This is a hugely innovative and ambitious web project, the first of its kind in the UK. Through 360-degree interactive photographic technology, embedded audio visual and video links, blogs, message boards and similar mechanisms, regularly updated from the field, the ‘Save the Children UK’-supporters will have a genuinely interactive experience. 

Every day, 30,000 children under the age of five lose their lives. They die because they don’t have the essentials we take for granted - nurses and midwives, essential medicines, clean water and the food they need to survive and grow. A child in Africa is thirty times more likely to die than a child in Britain. And the world lets this happen. The Child Survival Campaign aims to reduce these shocking facts. 
In February they (Save the Children UK) launched a three year supporter acquisition drive to get new supporters to join the mission. This will be an integrated campaign using both above and below the line channels.

The eyecatching part of the project are the webisodes, through 360-degree interactive photographic technology visitors can view videos, photo’s etc.
The video below is one of them. Video’s are also available at the Save the Children UK-YouTube channel.

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Having lived in Namibia for a year, I realize now just how little I was prepared for the experience. Having seen mainly tourist-type videos of the country, I was shocked by the poverty and barren landscape that I was to call my home. Many Westerners likely feel similarly about Africa, in general - it’s either genocide, AIDS or starvation...or pictures of game parks. There’s little ‘in between’ that tells the larger story of this magnificent continent.

Save the Children UK has done a fantastic job with “This is Kroo Bay”. Thank you for sharing.

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