Participatory Video with Farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa: Programme Report

This 57-page programme report shares the experience of using participatory video with farmers in six sub-Saharan countries - Angola, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Malawi, South Africa, and Uganda. Five United Kingdom (UK)-based development agencies, with support from Comic Relief, partnered with local organisations to use participatory video to engage with farmers around climate change impacts and other issue affecting agricultural production. Delivered by InsightShare, the overall goal of the workshop and video production programme was "to pilot the use of participatory video as a tool to support a range of organisations in their efforts to mitigate climate change impacts on various farming groups and communities across sub-Saharan Africa." This report presents an overview of the video projects and offers conclusions and recommendations from the experiences. A short compilation video accompanies this report (see below).

In each country, the UK-based agencies worked with local partners to deliver 12-day skills training and participatory video production workshops with farmers. The produced films focus on issues such as the impact of climate change, techniques to increase yields, environmental degradation, and health and water issues, among many others. In some projects (Kenya, Malawi, Angola), the facilitators used an open process to address various key issues (other than environmental issues) affecting the group and their communities, using community mapping, brainstorms, and other tools. As a result, more topics are covered in these videos, which paint a broad picture of how climate change impacts exist as part of many issues farmers deal with. In Uganda and Côte d'Ivoire, workshops were more focused on assisting participants to explore changing agricultural practices and significant environmental changes, and the videos produced are more focused.

The report outlines the main achievements as follows, as extracted from the report:

• "Wide engagement in issues relating to climate change: Across all six projects some 72 farmers were engaged as direct participants and approximately 1,500 members of their immediate communities participated by either appearing in the videos and/or attending community screenings; discussing and debating the impact of climate change and the importance of planning for an uncertain future.
• Sharing knowledge of sustainable agriculture: The videos document sustainable agricultural techniques by farmers for farmers. These were shared at local screenings, often to large audiences, and helped catalyse and promote face-to-face communication and farmer-to-farmer sharing.
• Farmers’ voices heard: The processes and resulting videos enabled participating farmers and their communities to communicate their perspectives directly with multiple audiences; connecting organisations, funders, and the wider world with local realities. In the few months since the programme completion, several of the UK agencies and their partners have had internal screenings at their offices, connecting those who might not have a chance to visit their project locations with the farmers.
• Information and learning for the UK agencies: Together the videos provide key insights into the concerns and situations of various farming communities across sub-Saharan Africa, including how issues such as climate change and sustainable agriculture sit within a range of other daily concerns.
• Knowledge, motivation and communication: In most cases the participants now represent teams of local experts who have spent time considering the local issues as a group, have visited and spoken to many in their communities, and have seen many examples of agricultural practice, problems and potential solutions. The projects had an important impact on participants’ confidence and motivation to change their behaviour and to face issues relating to their local environment, and to continue working and sharing knowledge on these issues.
• Relationships shifted: The project opened new conduits for communication between the co-operatives, local supporting organisations, and surrounding communities; in some places changing attitudes about the communities’ capacity for change.
• Rich picture: The videos give information that is often rich with context, showing how participatory video can access the complexities of climate change mitigation, and how these issues are perceived locally.
• Potential: The projects have achieved a valuable engagement and awareness within the communities around issues of climate change that if followed up by partners, could have far-reaching impact. Follow-up could include: further screenings to extend the farmer-to-farmer sharing and inspire adaptations strategies, locally and between project locations; further climate change sensitisation and education work, using the videos as an entry point and building on the foundations laid in terms of engagement and awareness; providing capacity-building for keen local teams to continue using participatory video as a tool for local work around climate change mitigation."

The report gives a description of the overall programme methodology as it relates to participatory video and the participatory ethos. It explains that participatory video is used to bring together the voices of a community, while also empowering people with skills to act for change. InsightShare's method "values local knowledge, builds bridges between communities and decision-makers, and enables people to develop greater control over the decisions affecting their lives." The ethos is based on an "evolving body of techniques typically labelled as Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) and Participatory Learning and Action (PLA), and is premised on particular attitudes and behaviours that value collective and consensual decision-making and equalised power relations." Equally, InsightShare’s practice of using participatory video "strives to be participant-centred and participant-led at every opportunity; to engage local people in ways that suit them, and to enable them to determine local needs and opportunities and adjust the participatory video process to be an effective tool for them."

The report also looks at how and why participatory video is suited to this kind of work: the technology is fun and accessible for rural communities; it celebrates local knowledge; learning occurs collectively and people learn from each other; it allows for triangulation of data; and it equalises relationships including around gender.

Following a detailed description of each of the country projects as well as a discussion of some of the challenges and limitations, the report outlines the following key recommendations for programme partners:

• "Continue to share the videos and use them as an entry point for further work on climate change mitigation and sustainability.
• Where appropriate, provide support for local dissemination strategies – the debate could reach many more through screenings, which could promote community cohesion by creating a forum for discussion, to inspire innovation and the sharing of agricultural knowledge.
• Provide support through capacity-building in participatory video facilitation and supplying video equipment for those participants and local partners keen to continue using the tool locally to inspire, document and share agricultural and climate mitigation strategies.
• Provide support for the horizontal exchange of videos between project locations to inspire farmer innovation and share community-based adaptation techniques."

Click here to watch the videos.