Roberta Oster Sachs, Emmy Award-winning TV Producer and Leadership Trainer

“We cannot succeed when half of us are held back” – Malala Yousafzai

"Working as a journalist for two decades at NBC, ABC, and CBS Network TV News, I had the privilege of using the powerful medium of television to report on stories about those who were “held back.” Producing stories about women’s rights, social issues and human rights, I saw how culture played a key role in each story through the characters I interviewed; like the Afghan women who escaped from the Taliban, the African American U.S. Army pilots called Tuskegee Airmen, who fought in a segregated Army in World War II, and Sally Kaye, a Holocaust survivor who traveled back to the concentration camp where she had been tortured, to tell her story, in person, to young visitors at Auschwitz.

These stories drive development by educating and hopefully inspiring viewers to action. But we have so much work to do. Just a few weeks ago over 200 girls were kidnapped from their school in Nigeria – targeted by religious fundamentalists because these “girls” dared to get an education. As Sheryl Wudunn writes, “Decades from now, people will look back and wonder how societies could have acquiesced in a sex slave trade in the twenty-first century that is...bigger than the transatlantic slave trade was in the nineteenth.” We must use the power of the media to tell these important stories – for this is our only way to affect social change."

Find out more:

Oster Sachs Communications – media production & consulting

The Frontier Project