Platform for African – European Partnership in Agricultural Research for Development

Saturday, December 13, 2014

African TV stations broadcast videos hosted on Access Agriculture

13 December 2014. More TV stations across Africa start to broadcast videos that are hosted on the Access Agriculture website. Likewise more and more radio stations broadcast the audio files of the same videos for their listeners. 

Appealing and of high educational value, videos hosted on the Access Agriculture website have been used by thousands of organisations to strengthen the capacities of their staff and of the farmers with whom they work. Many NGOs, development agencies, farmer organisations, universities, national research and extension staff, as well as radio journalists and TV broadcasters have used videos in various ways.

Using either the English, French or local language versions, TV stations have broadcast videos hosted on Access Agriculture  in Bangladesh (local cable TV stations and BTV), Benin (BB24, Tunde Agric TV), Burundi (Télévision Nationale du Burundi), Central African Republic (Télévision Centrafricaine), Democratic Republic of Congo (community television of Kinzau-Mvuete), Gambia (GRTV), Ghana (Channel 3), Guinea (RTG),
Malawi (Channel of All Nations and Times TV), Nepal (NTV), Niger (Canal3 in Malanville), Nigeria (the federal Nigerian Television Authority as well as the state-owned Broadcasting Service of Ekiti State) and Uganda (UBC).

Below, Access Agriculture  showcases creative ways through which farmers have watched farmer-to-farmer training videos made available to them in multiple local languages on DVDs. Exciting stories can be shared by sending an email to augustin@accessagriculture.org.
In 2011 a young rice farmers named Ahmed Naleba, from a village in Nampologoma sub-county, in Uganda, wrote an email to Grace Musimami, asking for the rice advice videos he had seen advertised in the newspaper. Ahmed’s family, neighbours and about 1000 other villagers are organised in an association called CITARD, in the traditional lowland rice growing area of eastern Uganda. Ahmed and his colleagues have shown the video to about 300 people so far. One farmer, Alpha Mwaagale has been very good about getting out his TV set and putting it outside, in front of his house in the evening. He puts on the rice advice videos and when people pass by they say “hey, there’s a Nigerian video!” Alpha waves them over, and they stop to watch the rice videos. The folks in Nampologoma watched the videos themselves, without an outside facilitator to answer their questions. Later the people began mulching their rice straw instead of burning it. They adopted transplanting in lines, and other practices they saw on the videos. One elder woman says she doubled her yields. More information on how much money farmers earn on economic and forex trading 
In 2011 when rice farmer Morris Engin in Barr, Lira, in North-East Uganda read about the rice advice videos (in Farmers’ Media), he phoned the editor and asked for a copy, which he later picked up in Kampala. Morris and his neighbours are organised in a cooperative and grow irrigated rice. They watched the videos eagerly. Morris showed the videos every Sunday in the cooperative’s rice warehouse and he took the videos around to other villages to show them. Eventually 500 people saw the videos. After watching the videos people began planting in lines, and began using more fertiliser, which they had only started to use in 2010. Where they had been getting 10 bags they were getting 16 or 17 now. Neighbours shared the ideas with others who had not seen the videos.
Similar stories like the one above on video use in Africa, Asia and Latin America can be found on he Agro-Insight website.

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