The African Child Memes makes it to BBC,thinks the Child has been used

BBC wrote about one of the most popular memes in the world and revealed where it originated from in an article titled “What a viral picture tells us about child poverty in Africa.” this is an excerpt from it:


“The photo has been copied and posted countless times but with the images and funny captions has come a serious debate about how the Western world views and reports on poverty and African children. .
This image was originally posted to Reddit 3 years ago. Since then, it’s been copied and captioned countless times. Many of the captions play on a crude stereotype of Africa as war-torn, poor, and suffering constant food shortages: It’s become such a widespread internet meme that BBC Trending wondered – who is the boy? And what does the spread of his picture tell us about the internet’s culture and prejudices? .
The first issue raised by memes like this is one of privacy. We haven’t yet found the boy or his parents, and we don’t even know if they are aware of the image going viral. We’ve chosen to publish the picture to highlight the debate it raises. We have, however, tracked down the woman in the picture. Heena Pranav is a 28-year-old doctor who lives in Chicago.
Back in 2012 she was a medical student and she’d travelled to Gulu, Uganda, to help an aid project. The child in the photo wasn’t connected to the aid project – Pranav says she met him at a local market and guessed he was about two or three years old. She said:.”I was with a group of other medical students at the time, we were walking around and I saw this little boy, he seemed really sweet.
His mom was nearby working in the market. I went up to him to play with him and say ‘hi’… he was the most animated child I’ve ever met.” Their brief encounter was captured by another member of the group who posted it online and it went viral. Pranav added that: “I can’t imagine this would have happened. I wished the kid and his mom could have known about it and somehow benefited from it, because I do think he was exploited in the process.”