This weekend I had the opportunity to attend the BuildEthiopia Conference at Harvard University. Hosted by Ethiopian Global Initiatives, the conference aims to “encourage participants to envision and support the transformation of Ethiopia by providing a space for constructive dialogue, learning and sharing.” The program encouraged thought on a lot of topics, and I’ll probably cover a few of them in the coming weeks.

One theme that recurred through several speakers is that Ethiopia (and most of Africa in general), in colloquial terms, has a bad rap. Liz Ngonzi explained this by way of a Google image search. Type in “Ethiopia” and what you get most often is what she aptly described as “poverty porn.” Starving children, barren fields, no water. It’s true, in many areas these things are indeed issues. But just to put things in perspective, areas of California have those things too. Type “California” into a google image search and I bet you get some very different images. 

If you are in marketing you know that bad publicity is very hard to recover from. One rat in the french fry cooker and you are out of business for good. In modern media, these things can follow you around for decades. Ethiopia is not free of problems, no place is. But it is not a stagnant pool either. Victorian and colonial ideas about Africa being “a land before time” are dangerously persistent. Ethiopia’s television media coming-of-age was during the famines of the 1980s. This may have dug them even deeper into the negative media abyss than most other places. 

A quick story: I have a friend, Karen. She is a brilliant chemist and slightly younger than me—putting her in grade school in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Up until a few years ago when she started getting papers published, a search for her full name led to a penpal letter she wrote in second grade to a school partner in Japan. Eight-year-old Karen liked horses. A lot. Those horse followed her around for decades. Ethiopia has the same problem as Karen. But instead of horses, Ethiopia had famine. A lot.

From Newsweek to South Park, the image of starving children cannot be plucked from the collective western mind. Combine those first “Save the Children” television images with problematic ideas about Africa as somehow outside of the movement of time and what you get is the recipe for a public relations disaster that is hard to shake.

The new media paradigm—social networks, global connectivity, mobile web access—all have the incredible potential for reshaping that collective conscience, and doing it quickly, what TMS Ruge termed “Africa 3.0.” The responsibility lies on all of us, in Africa and out. With the relatively recent installation of submarine fiber optic broadband cabling along the east African coast, subsequent connectivity and skyrocketing mobile saturation, it is finally Ethiopia’s turn to lead the conversation.

At the same time, I hope the images that define Ethiopia for this next generation are not handpicked by Ethiopian government and tourism authorities. I don’t expect the famine images to disappear. What I am hoping for is simply reality—from real people, showing the beauties and the difficulties of their daily lives. As in almost every large scale news event, from post-Katrina New Orleans to pre-revolution Tunisia, what is most important in shaping the current dialogue—and shaping history—is media by the people, for the people.

During lunch, I had the opportunity to sit with Tesfaye Yilma, the Ambassador of the Embassy of Ethiopia in the US. While I don’t agree with all of what he said, he reminded us that culturally it is not considered proper to boast, (I think the Amharic word he used was ደልቃቃ — dälqaqa — “an arrogant person”). At a table of mostly young, media savvy people we tried to remind him that marketing and communication is different than arrogance. Marketing and more importantly, the freedom of average people to communicate in new ways, is imperative for the Ethiopia of today.

Gabe Scelta is the Innovation Director at Ethicodes. A fellow at the Emerge Venture Lab, Gabe’s deep knowledge of the technology industry keeps Ethicodes pushing the frontiers of the fair trade industry. He holds a master’s degree from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and a bachelor’s degree from Boston University. He lives in New York City.