Access Agriculture works across all developing countries to enable the South-South exchange of, and access to, quality audio-visual training materials to secure sustainable livelihoods of rural people. Access Agriculture facilitates and builds capacity for the production and translation of quality farmer-to-farmer training videos into local languages. It provides quality training material for rural advisory services and agricultural education systems, and improves access of youth, women, smallholder, and marginalised farmers to relevant knowledge to enhance farmers’ skills and decision-making.
Producing high quality farmer-to-farmer videos
Since 2013, Access Agriculture has been training around 100 young professionals from various organisations in six African countries and three Asian countries to make quality farmer-to-farmer videos. The videos are a way of moving ideas faster, and more clearly, beyond borders, and to encourage farmers to experiment with new insights and adapt the learning to their local context. People trained continue receiving support to produce videos. Access Agriculture backstops the complete process of production: topic identification, fact sheet and script writing, filming editing, encoding, and uploading on the website. The process is an iterative one involving videographers and experts identified for the topics. The latter check and comment on the factsheet, the script, and the rough edit of video.
Videos are uploaded on the open access video platform and categorised into different sections, covering crops, livestock, aquaculture, sustainable land management and business skills. The Access Agriculture video platform hosts the videos produced by these young professionals, and by other agencies, if the videos meet Access Agriculture’s quality and style standards. Two new videos on livestock were recently produced and uploaded, increasing the total number of videos to the website to 220 at the end of December 2021.
The latest videos are:
- Calcium deficiency in dairy cows, Access Agriculture (external link)
- Sprouting grains for livestock feed, Access Agriculture (external link)
Translating farmer-to-farmer videos in local languages
Videos produced and hosted on the Access Agriculture video platform are all available in English and French. Many farmers, especially women, in African countries are illiterate and can’t speak English or French. Most speak their native or local languages. The main beneficiaries of Access Agriculture videos are farmers.
Access Agriculture encourages all organisations working in developing countries to invest in translating videos available on the platform into local languages. Since 2013, Access Agricultural has trained more than 100 media partners in how to translate scripted videos. Those trained provide their services for the translation of scripts, recording the voices and editing on the timeline. Access Agriculture offers a fee-based translation service to anyone interested in using quality videos in their own farmer training programmes.
Through funding received from various organisations in 2021, we have completed 646 translations of videos in different local languages. At the end of December 2021, there are nearly 3,000 video versions in 92 languages on the platform. Especially for the 3 target countries of SustainSahel, we have 31 videos in Dioula and 44 in Moore for Burkina faso, 131 videos in Bambara for Mali, 61 videos in Wolof and 65 videos in Pulaar for Senegal.
Global use of farmer-to-farmer videos
Over 850,000 people from across the globe have visited the Access Agriculture website to watch and download farmer training videos. The global on-line survey conducted in 2021 revealed that of the respondents, 75% download videos, 43% factsheets, 36% video versions for mobile phones, 33% publications and 14% audio files. Many of the respondents use the videos for training farmers more than 6 times a year. 90% of users who have seen at least one video have also shared them and 63% of the respondents share the videos with other organisations; they listed almost 5,000 organisations by name.
Written by: Jonas Wanvoeke, Project Manager - Access Agriculture.
Further information
Links
www.accessagriculture.org: Video platform
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