World's Largest Film Industries Using Entertainment To Improve Lives

India's Bollywood and Nigeria's Nollywood film industries are leveraging the power of entertainment in an effort to prevent disease and improve the quality of life for the hundreds of millions of viewers of their TV shows and films. A two-year, $2.5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to Hollywood, Health & Society (HH&S) is supporting a groundbreaking partnership across the world's leading entertainment industries to increase visibility of pressing social and health issues.

1. Now HH&S is going global, teaming up with new centers in Lagos, Nigeria and Mumbai, India that will conduct sustained and systematic outreach to their entertainment industries in order to increase the accuracy, accessibility and frequency of health and other socially-relevant topics in television, film and new media.
2. In Lagos, HH&S is partnering with Nollywood Workshops, directed by Bond Emeruwa and Aimee Corrigan, to launch the Gist program. Gist will support independent filmmakers in Nollywood's thriving entertainment scene who are working to inspire and inform a growing audience across Africa. In early 2014, Gist will host at a high-profile industry event in Nigeria, where leading Hollywood writers will join their Nollywood counterparts and top medical experts in a series of workshops and site visits.
3. In Mumbai, HH&S and the Asian Center for Entertainment Education have created The Third Eye, which will produce original content dealing with pressing public health and development issues, and will also provide free expert resources on a wide variety of medical and scientific topics.  Long known for its entertaining musicals and comedies, Bollywood is now seeing the rise of a "parallel cinema" featuring more serious and provocative stories. Vinta Nanda, founder and managing director of The Third Eye, is a writer and producer known for her pioneering work as creator of the popular Indian TV series, Tara. HH&S trips bringing Grey's Anatomy co-executive producer Zoanne Clack and Writers Guild of America, West president Chris Keyser to Mumbai laid the groundwork for the Third Eye collaboration.