{"id":219,"date":"2024-11-13T16:11:41","date_gmt":"2024-11-13T21:11:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/npsia\/?post_type=cu_people&p=219"},"modified":"2024-12-06T15:35:18","modified_gmt":"2024-12-06T20:35:18","slug":"firdaus-kharas","status":"publish","type":"cu_people","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/npsia\/people\/firdaus-kharas\/","title":{"rendered":"Firdaus Kharas"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Chairman and Executive Producer, Chocolate Moose Media<\/strong>
Master of Arts, International Affairs (\u201980)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the United Nations and other nongovernmental organizations identify an intractable communication problem somewhere in the world, they frequently call Firdaus Kharas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His approach to urgent, sometimes deadly crises is deceptively simple: he creates animated public service announcements and videos that resonate with people across cultures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI try to appeal to the commonalities we have as human beings,\u201d explains Mr. Kharas, who has tackled subjects such as domestic violence, childhood diabetes, Ebola treatment and Zika virus prevention. \u201cI choose projects that are oriented towards improving or saving lives.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps Mr. Kharas\u2019 most famous campaign is \u201cThe Three Amigos\u201d, which features three animated condoms discussing HIV prevention. It was introduced on South African television channels during the height of the AIDS crisis in 2005. Condom sales more than tripled and Mr. Kharas was credited with saving 18,000 lives in a year as a result.
\u201cHIV was a death sentence at the time, but the South African government wasn\u2019t acknowledging the problem or dealing with it,\u201d says Mr. Kharas, who won dozens of awards including a Peabody Award for the campaign. \u201cThe ad was played in four African languages and displayed on buses, trains, jumbotrons, in doctors\u2019 offices and at every university in the coun\u00adtry.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He says the desire to do good in society was a path \u201cthat was always clear to me.\u201d He vividly recalls visiting Mother Teresa\u2019s clinic in his hometown of Calcutta with his mother, who was the head of a nongovernmental organ\u00adization, when he was 8-years-old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI grasped then the importance of living and working outside of one\u2019s comfort zone for the benefit of others,\u201d he told a Carleton University audience in 2015, after receiving an honorary doctorate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After spending his childhood in Calcutta, Mr. Kharas attended high school in Pennsylvania as an exchange student. He stayed in the U.S. for his undergraduate studies and considered attending Harvard for a master\u2019s degree in international affairs. But John Sigler, a former director of the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, convinced him to come to Carleton in 1979.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt was a very brief conversation,\u201d recalls Mr. Kharas. \u201cHe offered me a full scholarship and that changed the course of my life. I became Canadian.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Kharas went on to study marketing and law at the University of Ottawa, management at Harvard University and social innovation at Stanford University. He headed the United Nations Association and spent six years in the Canadian public service\u2014both in foreign affairs and with the Immi\u00adgration and Refugee Board of Canada\u2014before leaving in 1995 to create Chocolate Moose Media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen I told people that I was going to start a \u2018hybrid\u2019 company that would use for-profit media work to fund nonprofit media for social change across many cultures and that I would give it away for free, more than one international affairs expert gave me a highly quizzical look,\u201d he recalls. \u201cBut this reflects what I was doing in international affairs, just with different means.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Kharas\u2019 company\u2019s first campaign was for UNICEF, in which UNICEF animated each part of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child using studios all over the world. He recognized there was a need to not just educate people, but change their behaviour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI don\u2019t believe in bashing people on the head with information,\u201d he says. \u201cMy approach with animation is that it\u2019s funny, it\u2019s viewed repeatedly and people internalize the message and come to their own conclusions.\u201d
Mr. Kharas\u2019 most recent project involves creating animated shorts about the teenagers who are among the 600,000 Colombian refugees living in Ecuador.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey\u2019ve gone under the radar of much of the world and these teens feel discriminated against. We want to help increase their sense of self-worth and self-esteem,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As he spoke to graduates at Carleton University in 2015, Mr. Kharas told them to follow their passion and \u201cdon\u2019t let anyone stop you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf you have the talent to make a difference\u2014if you can save the life of one child\u2014that is your duty,\u201d he argues. \u201cAt the end of it all, I\u2019m just trying to save one life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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