Keywords

Introduction

There are diseases that are particularly associated with poverty because sufferers lack proper sanitation and hygiene, which are the drivers of said diseases. Malaria, tuberculosis, and the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) which causes the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) are referred to as the “big three” diseases of poverty, while “a diverse group of communicable diseases caused by bacteria, helminths, protozoa or viruses” (Engels and Zhou 2020, p. 1) make up the neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). NTDs are so called because they do not enjoy the same attention as the life-threatening big three. However, NTDs disable and disfigure sufferers, and they have come into the limelight because their aggregate burden is the equivalent of any of the big three as they affect an estimated 2 billion people.

Globally, in tackling the diseases of poverty, the vertical, biomedical approach has often held sway, with drug administration for eradication being the order of the day. While this approach has been logical in immediately arresting the diseases, robust, holistic, and multisectoral approaches addressing the context and drivers of diseases have not been as common and we have continued to experience the diseases (Asiedu et al. 2008; Allotey et al. 2012; Tusting et al. 2016; Engels and Zhou 2020). In recognition, the World Health Organization (WHO) has had to come up with frameworks for tackling these persistent diseases. For instance, the 2013 Multisectoral Action Framework for Malaria “emphasizes complementarity, effectiveness and sustainability, and capitalizes on the potential synergies to accelerate both socio-economic development and malaria control” (p. 9), since “malaria is both a result and a cause of a lack of development” (p. 11). In spite of this, Tusting et al. (2016) point out the paucity of discourse on how such multi-sectoral interventions should take place, and this is also the case with NTDs. In particular, water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) services have been identified as tools for tackling the root causes of NTDs, but their importance has been largely undervalued (Sightsavers 2013). To tackle such root causes is to tackle poverty and promote an awareness of same. The media are in a vantage position to do this.

The media, as the fourth estate of the realm, have the potential to perform some essential functions in a multi-sectoral approach to disease eradication (Martinson and Hindman 2005; Chapman 2007). Being information providers and information drivers, the media educate the public on matters of importance and significance, including health in general and diseases in particular (Owolabi 2014; Sodeinde et al. 2015). On days earmarked for creating awareness for diseases therefore, the media are always well represented to advance the awareness creation and educate people on the particular diseases being singled out. While this chapter joins the stream of other voices identifying the role of the media in tackling poverty (e.g., Leask et al. 2010; McArthur and Reeves 2019), its argument is anchored on Nigerian online media reports of the inaugural NTDs day. It seeks to address questions regarding if and how the reports have raised stakeholders’ consciousness about the need to tackle poverty in order to tackle NTDs.

NTDs Day

January 30 is the day chosen as the World NTDs Day to raise awareness about the diseases that are endemic among “the bottom billion” (Smith and Lynch 2004, p. 693) of the world residing in its tropical and subtropical regions. This day is significant because it marks the anniversary of the London Declaration on NTDs of the year 2012 when the World Health Organization’s (WHO) roadmap for the prevention and control of NTDs was published. The launch of the NTDs Day, funded by the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, was precipitated by the need to “#EndTheNeglect,” considering that with the 2012 road map, even though there had been substantial progress, a lot more needed to be done to spur stakeholders into action. Over 250 global partners, including pharmaceutical companies, the Nigerian Ministry of Health, and other organizations, signed up to commemorate the inaugural celebration of the day in 2020 as an avenue to win the war against NTDs.

Perhaps then, lack of a broader development agenda that is focused on equity is responsible for the persistence of NTDs, which ironically are treatable with a perfect rate of recovery achievable (Allotey et al. 2012). Arguably, NTDs have remained persistent because poverty, their contextual driver, remains persistent. We can liken this to the case of malaria. Tusting et al. (2016) note that although “long-lasting insecticide-treated nets (LLINs), indoor residual spraying and improved case management… are highly effective interventions, malaria is closely associated with poverty and underdevelopment” (p. 2). They, therefore, call for “long-term… sustainable control strategies… that embrace non-health sectors, including agriculture, water & sanitation, and housing [WASH]” (p. 2). Such long-term sustainable control strategies take cognizance of the need to decisively address social factors such as economic empowerment, health seeking behavior, sanitation, and the environment in a multi-sectoral manner. Similarly, Engels and Zhou (2020) stress that China’s eradication of schistosomiasis was strongly to do with its (i) strong national policies in favor of multidisciplinary disease control; (ii) intersectoral action for health and development, piloted by municipalities and local governments; and (iii) a strong emphasis on equity and poverty reduction in areas where it was most needed (p. 5). As a world awareness day, therefore, January 30 “offer[s] an annual opportunity to mobilize greater attention, action and investment on priority issues, particularly in the countries and communities most directly affected” [by NTDs] (worldntdday.org). Poverty is unequivocally a priority issue in NTDs’ eradication, and it is necessary to examine the media’s interpretation of this fact on the world awareness day.

The Media in Poverty and Disease Eradication Although coverage of poverty is an ethical responsibility of journalism, providing an avenue to focus on important issues affecting the society (Yousuf and Craig 2017), research suggests that the structure of media outlets, their routines, and practices do not encourage journalists to dwell often on poverty in their reports even though it is pervasive (Redden 2011; Devereux et al. 2012). In other words, ironically, the pervasiveness of poverty does not make it newsworthy in and of itself (Wood and Barnes 2007; Owolabi and O’Neill 2014). However, poverty has always found relevance in many ancillary contexts. In the base of the pyramid (BoP) discourse, poverty occupies a central position as private corporations seek to maximize profit by taking advantage of the “latent collective purchasing power” of the poor (Arora and Romijn 2012, p. 483). With regard to governance and journalistic practice, Sodeinde et al. (2015) report that poverty alleviation or eradication is contingent upon successful continuation of previous administration’s interventions and development journalism as against traditional journalism. McArthur and Reeves (2019) thus note that in the face of rising unemployment in the twenty-first century, stigmatization of the poor in British newspapers is also on the rise.

Poverty is also rarely mentioned in news coverage of health. Some scholars have observed that there will always be some limitation in media coverage of health issues (Nelkin 1996; Schwitzer et al. 2005), particularly considering that journalists are more comfortable with anecdotes, expert testimony in place of publications, controversy and not consensus, and polarities rather than complexities in issues (Nelkin 1996). Such practices inform how poverty is portrayed in relation to health. The “othering” of the poor is also commonplace, hence the mere occasional mention of poverty in health issues (Lister 2015; McArthur and Reeves 2019). In line with this, Yousuf and Craig (2017) are of the opinion that when the media highlight the health issues of the poor, they often show the poor in a negative light. When the poor are seen merely as the “other” and not quite a part of “us,” then it becomes difficult to do justice to their plight and identify with them as a group.

Poverty and NTDs in Nigeria Poverty in Nigeria has often been said to be a paradox—a situation where a large segment of the population in a resource-rich country leads impoverished lives (Nwaobi 2003; Omoyibo 2013). This is in spite of the many poverty alleviation/eradication programs launched by successive administrations. Military and civilian regimes alike have attempted to stem the tide of poverty, but the country so far has little or nothing to show for these efforts. From Operation Feed the Nation (OFN) to the Directorate for Food, Roads and Rural Infrastructure (DFRRI), to Better Life Programme (BLP), and to the National Poverty Eradication Programme (NAPEP) of 2001, no significant improvement in the plight of the poor in Nigeria has been recorded (Obadan 2001; Danaan 2018). Corruption, lack of political will, weak state structure, and impunity are among the factors that have been identified as leading to the increasing poverty situation in the country and the failure of the many poverty eradication programs (Oshewolo 2010; Danaan 2018). Evidence of this failure is well documented. In the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Index of 2019, released in 2020, Nigeria was ranked 161 among 189 member countries. In 2018, it was ranked 158. More alarmingly, Dapel (2018, p. 1) notes that 72% of the 91% of Nigeria’s populace living in poverty risk “spending their entire lifetime below the poverty line” of subsisting on $1.25 dollars a day. Dapel’s figures draw attention to the appalling segment of Nigeria’s population that is regarded as poor and also dampens hope regarding this segment’s ascension from poverty—which is tied to diseases like NTDs.

Poverty makes the incidence of diseases among the impoverished cyclical: their poor financial state predisposes the have-nots to infectious diseases since they cannot afford to live in clean environments with the necessary amenities; at the same time, the ensuing ill-health prevents them from pursuing greater economic freedom (Pearson 2015; Danaan 2018). As for NTDs, due to the disabilities they cause, they deny their sufferers access to schooling and gainful employment and so detract from their quality of life. As such, the Nigeria NTD Multi-Year Master Plan (2015–2020) stresses that “the strategic goal of the NTD Programme is to reduce morbidity, disability and mortality via the control, elimination and eradication of targeted NTDs and contribute to poverty alleviation.” By the foregoing, we understand that the government sees the eradication of NTDs as a way of contributing to poverty alleviation even if not eradication. In other words, so long as NTDs are controlled, eliminated, and eradicated, the war against poverty is being won and the disease burden gets lighter.

There are more than 20 NTDs, including leprosy, blinding trachoma, scabies, guinea worm disease, rabies, lymphatic filariasis (elephantiasis), onchoceraciasis (river blindness), and snake bites, and 15 of them affect more than half of the over 200 million total Nigerian population. In fact, Nigeria alone accounts for 45% of the population affected by NTDs in sub-Saharan Africa. The disease burden is felt in terms of population density and overcrowding—which promotes transmission, as well as rapid urbanization—which diverts [public] funds from rural areas to the urban areas and therefore denies poor rural dwellers (mostly women and children) the needed infrastructure for health and other social services. For this group of people, the media is their hope of escalating the message to stakeholders and thus ending the neglect.

Framing Theory

Frames are the specific ways in which events or issues are understood. Journalists and the generality of communicators use them to emphasize specific aspects of issues and downplay others, thereby defining problems, diagnosing causes, making value/moral judgments, and suggesting remedies (Entman 1993; de Vreese 2005). Framing entails drawing attention to certain attributes of the objects of news coverage and to the objects themselves (Goffman 1974). It occurs in two ways: “frame in communication or media frame,” i.e., how an event/occurrence or topic is communicated by a speaker to an audience, and “frame in thought or an individual frame,” i.e., how the audience perceives the communication (Chong and Druckman 2007, pp. 100–101). As such, framing is an antecedent of audience interpretation as well as the essence of audience perception (de Vreese 2005) of media messages. To this end, Neuman et al. (1992) identify five media frames to include human impact, powerlessness, economics, moral values, and conflict, while Semetko and Valkenburg (2000) note five similar frames of conflict, human interest, attribution of responsibility, morality, and economic consequences. All ten together are considered standard in frame typology (Linström and Marais 2012).

Alongside the frames employed in the media, the tone of media messages as well as the attention an issue gets in the media from various perspectives goes a long way in determining how the audience perceives such an issue (Damstra and Vliegenthart 2018). For instance, while the scientific origins and thus control of diseases are crucial, equally important are the social angles to disease control and eradication. We thus find that the frames created by the media around diseases are crucial to shaping people’s attitudes and beliefs about the diseases and consequently the success of the fight against such diseases. Perhaps now, more than ever before, we are beginning to appreciate the importance of framing in health communication, what with the COVID-19 pandemic, which also reinforces the connection between poverty and diseases (Bolsen et al. 2020; Diwakar 2020; Poirier et al. 2020). This study is, therefore, concerned with how poverty is framed with regard to the problem of NTDs and also the solution(s) to this problem. It is thus guided by the questions:

RQ1

How is poverty featured in the framing of the incidence of NTDs?

RQ2

How is poverty featured in the framing of eradicating NTDs?

Methodology

Data Gathering

A total of 34 online media reports in English about the inaugural celebration (2020) of the NTDs Day as observed in Nigeria were considered in this study. This is a small dataset and so following Van Gorp’s (2007) advice, we apply a qualitative frame analysis in order to examine the “subtle framing” it contains (Linström and Marais 2012, p. 27). The reports are the results of a Google search using the “news” and the “all” option in the search engine. Each of the 36 states in Nigeria and their capitals were entered as search words in combination with “Nigeria,” “Neglected Tropical Disease(s) Day,” “NTDs Day,” and “NTD Day.” Thus, media reports focused on the NTDs Day in Nigeria as a whole and in specific states in the country were part of the study as the units of analysis. For each search, the results of the first five Google landing pages were considered. The search turned up several media reports about NTDs in Nigeria, but only the ones about the NTDs awareness day were considered. While most of the reports were dated either 30 or 31 January, 2020, the earliest report was dated January 18, 2020, and the latest one, at the time, was dated February 13, 2020. For some of the reports which also contained Lassa Fever news, the NTDs Day aspect was culled. One of the results turned up by the search was a generic report on the inaugural NTDs Day as culled from worldntd.org by the news media pulse.ng to make for a sponsored post. The report was not focused on Nigeria and so it was not considered in the study. The search was carried out with the help of a research assistant from January 15 to February 29, 2020—some two weeks after the inaugural NTDs Day (January 30, 2020). This was to ensure as much as possible that even the news articles about the NTDs day that were not published on the day or the day after were eventually captured for the research.

Data Analysis

We identified four out of Neuman et al.’s (1992) and Semetko and Valkenburg (2000) 10 frames and also came up with a new one (intervention) through repeated reading and study of the reports. The following frames were identified with Linström and Marais’ (2012) tools of technical devices (e.g., headline, concluding statements, source selection, quote selection, etc.) and rhetorical devices (e.g., metaphors and exemplars).

Human Impact/Human Interest Identified through the description/listing of the impact of NTDs to affected people. Such impact includes loss of schooling and employment opportunities, disabilities (e.g., blindness), perpetuation of poverty, etc.

Powerlessness Identified through the description of the prevailing condition and environment for the diseases such as poverty, lack of WASH facilities, lack of access to health facilities, and also, mention of some or all of the diseases as a way of showing co-endemicity and the graveness of the disease situation.

Intervention Identified through mentions of efforts at tackling the diseases. Such efforts include drug administration, surgery, and training of personnel.

Attribution of Responsibility Identified through the mention of [the activities of] stakeholders responsible for ending the neglect and/or caring for the affected people. Also, mention of how vulnerable populations can reduce the incidence of the diseases.

Economic Here, the economic consequence of the incidence of the disease in the country is explained in economic terms like gross domestic product (GDP).

An attempt was made to identify the dominant, secondary, and other frames in each of the news reports, but not all of them presented all three. The dominant frame, as explained by Linström and Marais (2012), “is the main theme of the news article, while the secondary frame is a supplementary idea that supports the main theme.” In this research, we concluded that a frame is dominant when it employs the most technical and rhetorical tools among other frames in a given report. A breakdown of the reports is presented in Table 1 as shown in the Appendix.

Results

While some of the reports (13) focus on Nigeria as a whole, others are about specific states in the country. These are Ogun, Kwara, Abia, Adamawa, Ondo, Bauchi, Abia, Imo, Cross Rivers, and Plateau states. Four of the reports originated from social media platforms, including Facebook (three reports) and Nairaland (1 report), and two of these four reports originated from health non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Nigeria.

Thirty-one of the 34 reports are based on the testimonies of experts; only the two reports by the NGOs do not have expert testimonies. Except for one report that is drawn from the activities of the Christian Medical Scientists and Basic Health Foundation (CMESBAHF) and the two NGO reports, all other reports focusing on Nigeria revolve around the speech of the minister of health and, in some cases, the WHO Officer in Charge, Nigeria. One report by (punchng.com) is a long one that combines excerpts of the minister’s speech, excerpts of the speech of the Director of NTDs, Federal Ministry of Health, excerpts of the speech of the Commissioner for Health, Abia State, and excerpts of the speech of Nassarawa state commissioner for health. Similarly, those focused on the states revolve largely around each state’s health commissioner or permanent health secretary. One report on Ogun state which was culled from Facebook has neither a headline nor an expert testimony.

Context of Poverty, Prevalence of NTDs

The frames of powerlessness and human impact/human interest were the most identified in the reports. Without a doubt, NTDs thrive well in situations of poverty where hygiene is lacking and healthcare facilities are not readily available. Virtually all of the reports make allusions to poverty in talking about NTDs. Be that as it may, what makes their submissions really believable is the fact that the reports revolve around expert testimonies where poverty is pointed out as culpable in the continued existence of the diseases. The Nigerian Minister of Health, a World Health Organization (WHO) official, and state commissioners of health are given pride of place as the sources of the information disseminated by the journalists in the reports. In keeping with this, the reports employ technical tools such as headlines and quotes to remind the reader that poverty is indeed the context of these diseases. While a number of the headlines attract attention through the figures they quote and their choice of words, the quotes give context to the headlines. When punch.com.ng announces through its headline that “100 million Nigerians risk tropical diseases infection—FG,” it backs this up in the report with a direct quote from the minister that “people afflicted are usually poor… live in poor conditions with limited or no access to basic education and healthcare amenities like potable water, sanitation or knowledge of hygiene.”

The state commissioners of health make similar submissions. For the novice and the average Nigerian with limited or no knowledge of the diseases, the fact that such trusted people make these statements is enough for them to have an understanding that the diseases actually affect only the poor; meanwhile, the diseases are only prevalent among the poor as they can be contracted by anyone regardless of their socioeconomic status. In this spirit, the Health Commissioners, just like the Minister, are careful to mention that practically all areas of their states are at risk, but the larger chunk of their rhetoric makes it clear that only the poor really have to fear. The Kwara State Health Commissioner points out that adults and children in all 16 local government areas of the state have been treated for NTDs; just as the Ogun State Health Commissioner notes that none of the 20 local government areas in the state is free from NTDs; and their Abia State counterpart stresses that since 2015 some 2.8 million people in all 17 local government areas of the state are treated annually for river blindness, soil transmitted helminthiasis, and lymphatic filariasis.

Kwara State Health Commissioner: …disease is associated with disability and disfiguration, taking away not only their health but also their chances of staying in school, earning a living or even being accepted by their family or community (vanguardngr.com, January 30, 2020).

Ogun State Health Commissioner: NTDs are group of infectious diseases that are associated with poverty (dailypost.ng, January 29, 2020); …the burden of the diseases is huge with many of the sufferers developing disabilities with negative socioeconomic consequences (dailytrust.com, January 30, 2020).

Plateau State Health Commissioner: NTDs, which are communicable diseases, are usually prevalent in areas that had poor sanitation, inadequate or no safe water sources (sunnewsonline.com, January 30, 2020).

Similarly, the WHO report featured on allafrica.com and reliefweb.int (as indicated in the reports) stresses the importance of poverty to NTDs, noting that “[N]eglected tropical diseases (NTDs) threaten more than 1.5 billion people living in the poorest and most marginalized communities worldwide.” Given the status of the WHO as a global body, Nigerians are likely to consider it (WHO) as the last bastion of truth on health matters and so see any statement by it as the ultimate. In essence, they come to understand that while poverty is not the cause of NTDs, NTDs are most definitely at home in poverty endemic locations. It is almost as though without poverty the diseases would not be in existence. This understandable preoccupation with poverty brings about the human impact frame. The effects of the NTDs on the affected population as highlighted by the experts end up being descriptors of the poor and the poverty that marks them out in its multi-dimensions. In the only instance that a non-expert’s testimony is featured, it becomes a rhetorical exemplar tool which draws attention to the disadvantaged position of the poor. In the WHO report, there is a brief narrative of a man whose neighbor suffers from one of the diseases. The man relates in Pidgin English that his neighbor’s Buruli Ulcer was thought to be a spiritual attack which doctors could not cure. This narrative points again to the context of poverty which manifests as a lack of enlightenment occasioned by a lack of education. It is reinforced further in the WHO report and others.

thenationonline.ng (January 31, 2020): Child NTDs-sufferers shy away from attending school, grow up with no skill and are hindered in basic occupation, like farming and fishing, or any avenue of earning a living.

reliefweb.int (February 5, 2020) and allafrica.com (February 5, 2020): These diseases blind, disable and disfigure people, taking away not only their health, but also their chances of staying in school, earning a living, or even being accepted by their family or community.

The above extracts have inverted the relationship between poverty and NTDs, suggesting that NTDs cause poverty but neglecting to point out that the unsanitary living conditions associated with the poor are also drivers of the diseases. They lend credence to the fact that there is a cyclical relationship between NTDs and poverty.

Having considered how poverty is framed in relation to the incidence of NTDs, we now take a look at how it is framed in the eradication of NTDs. We identify the frames created for the eradication and see if and how poverty fits in.

Stemming the Tide: Poverty and/or Diseases?

The reports afford poverty some importance when the concept of NTDs is introduced so that the two (poverty and NTDs) exist side by side as equal but different. As such, it would be logical if poverty were to feature prominently when solutions to the disease situation are discussed. However, this is not the case. The reports create some kind of polarity while leaving out the necessary complexities as we see in the intervention frame where poverty and NTDs part ways but NTDs feature as the only one of the pair considered for eradication. This is the biomedical approach of “fixing” the situation through the metaphor of drug administration/surgery as intervention. It runs through most of the reports as shown in the examples below.

Vanguardngr (January 30, 2020): “In Kwara, we have distributed drugs such as Mectizan, Albendazole, Praziquantel and Mebendazole to combat these diseases. We have also carried out free surgical operations on 210 patients with hydrocele.”

punchng.com (January 31, 2020): About 2.8 million persons across the 17 LGAs in Abia have annually been treated with Mectizan and Abendazole for the control of river blindness, soil transmitted helminthiasis and lymphatic filariasis since 2015.

prnigeria.com (February 3, 2020): …although treatments for NTDs are accessible, Nigerians must make sure everyone affected by the disease get [sic] treatment in order to eradicate the disease.

Since the reports already suggest in some instances that NTDs are the cause of poverty, it stands to reason that they would be more concerned about slugs, bugs, and drugs, as well as technical fixes. The experts in the three excerpts above (Kwara State Health Commissioner, Abia State Health Commissioner, and WHO OIC, Nigeria) focus on the treatment of the diseases either with drugs or with surgery. At other times, the training of personnel is presented as intervention toward the eradication of the diseases. This occurrence is recorded in two reports from Ogun State and one from Abia State as indicated below:

dailypost.ng (January 29, 2020): “The [Ogun] State Government treated 780, 657 children in 6000 schools and trained 8500 teachers on NTDs in 2019,” she [commissioner for health] said.

punchng.com (January 30, 2020): He [permanent secretary, Abia state ministry of health] said in order to stem the tide of these diseases the state government with the support of Carter Centre had trained 45 local integrated health team members, 611 community directed distributors, 2153 teachers, 42 school supervisors and seven Social Mobilisation Officers.

punchng.com (January 30, 2020): She [Commissioner for Health] said that the state’s NTDs programme treated 780, 657 children in 6000 schools in 2019 and trained 8500 teachers in NTDs within the same period.

Although the assignment of the trained people is not explained, there is a general understanding that they are to work toward eradicating the diseases. In addition to this particular intervention is that of the creation of WASH facilities as mentioned by Kwara State Health Commissioner and reported in a similar manner in two outlets. This is the only intervention that touches on poverty eradication.

thenigerianpost.com.ng (January 30, 2020): He [Kwara State Health Commissioner] pledges the state government will give support in the area of improved water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), reversing the cycle of poverty and saying no to stigmatisation, among others.

businessday.ng (January 30, 2020): He [Kwara State Health Commissioner] pledged that the state government will give support in the area of improved water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), reversing the cycle of poverty and saying no to stigmatisation, among others.

One other frame employed in discussing the eradication of NTDs is that of attribution of responsibility. Mostly, the reports identify stakeholders as the ones solely responsible for ending the neglect and putting an end to NTDs. Metaphors, exemplars, headlines, concluding statements, and quote selections are used to build this frame. While some reports attribute responsibility to stakeholders such as government and development partners (e.g., Carter Centre, NGOs), others attribute responsibility to the people, i.e., the vulnerable population, as well. While it is the job of government and other stakeholders to intensify efforts in creating awareness, training people as the case may be, and providing medical assistance, the people are urged to be more conscious of their environment and take better care of themselves.

Discussion and Conclusion

As Allotey et al. note, “from a biomedical and clinical sciences perspective, diseases of poverty represent ‘slugs, bugs and drugs’ and present an ideal opportunity for technical fixes” (2012, p. 336). Understandably, the news reports are basically about diseases and not poverty, hence the featuring of health experts alone. Economists cannot feature in these reports as elaborately as health experts but a strong case ought to be made about the importance of tackling poverty if the NTDs are to be completely eradicated. The onus is on the journalists to at least succinctly comment on the need to fight poverty in order to fight NTDs. Journalists draw inferences from the submissions of experts, and in this case, a most important inference that was not drawn is the necessity of tackling poverty. This gap creates an amputated frame where poverty is touted, if not necessarily as the proximal or distal cause of NTDs, but at least as a driver; yet it is left out in the resolution of the NTDs conflict. Poverty is framed as an essential context for NTDs, but it shabbily and conspicuously loses prominence when it comes to conquering NTDs. This is a case of asymmetric framing where the media reports on an issue are one-sided (Bolsen and Shapiro 2018; van der Linden et al. 2019). Such an amputated frame leaves the reader unsure about how exactly stakeholders plan to eradicate NTDs when their key driver is not taken care of. While the prevalence of poverty might not make it newsworthy, the occasions of awareness days such as the NTDs day should be better seized by the media as opportunities for raising consciousness about it as a major structural problem that needs to be tackled.

Considering that the chances of featuring an economist, a sociologist, or a medical anthropologist in such reports are slim, journalists should conduct independent research and incorporate narratives that show the plight of the neglected poor people as it relates to NTDs. Experts can only speak authoritatively about what they know, hence the featuring of drug administration and training of health workers in the intervention frame. As such, more of what is needed is the building of poverty eradication into the frame of intervention. With such a frame, the discourse on poverty will be escalated and the chances of eradicating not only NTDs but diseases of poverty in general will be improved. This will be a way of not just combating the scourge but also combating its accomplice (poverty) and alerting the authorities to their huge responsibility, failing which the poor might yet again be subjected to stigmatization and marginalization, with the real possibility of them being considered solely responsible for their poor state of health. Indeed, it is necessary to “maintain continuity of and expand pro-poor development interventions” (Diwakar 2020, p. 14) if NTDs are to be effectively eliminated, and the media’s role is to frame poverty and diseases comprehensively as a way of reminding stakeholders to continue the fight.

The rather small dataset considered in this study as well as the similarity of the reports may be seen as limiting in some ways, but they actually point out succinctly the minimal attention paid to poverty in the context of NTDs in Nigeria as a whole even on the NTDs awareness day. While online reports alone were the units of analysis, the dataset is representative of Nigeria as all the geopolitical zones are featured in the reports. In addition, another contribution of this study is that it identifies the frame of intervention, thereby facilitating the possibility of addressing the issues identified by other frames.

Admittedly, the year 2020 is the first edition of the World NTDs Day, but considering that a large percentage of those affected by the diseases live in Nigeria, the Nigerian media space ought to have been more inundated with reports about the diseases from varying angles. Hopefully, there will be an improvement in subsequent years, especially since underlying health conditions have been identified as risk factors for deadlier diseases like COVID-19. Further research can thus be a comparative study of countries’ media coverage of the awareness day and the diseases over a period of time.