Farmer’s knowledge platform: promotion of innovations in local languages

The world’s existing network of extension agents may not be enough to disseminate farmer-to-farmer training videos to reach the millions of people who need new ideas.

In general yield production videos for farmer become more common by various sorts of actors in communities. However, the multi-faceted issues that farmers face during production, need to be overcome for the sustainable development in agriculture.

As agricultural production is growing, economic and environmental challenges have also increased. To face these challenges, both technical experts and practitioners have been working on ways to produce food and persistently coming up with new solutions or variants on old ones. 

Across the world, these agricultural techniques can offer real solutions for food security together with the conservation of natural resources. However, these are often being not practiced by farmers due to lack of information and knowledge dissemination and evidently language has proven to be a barrier to reach these farmers.

To improve farmers’ access to relevant knowledge and enable experienced farmers to share their knowledge with others, both in their own country and beyond, video projection can work as a ‘mass training tool’. Various studies have shown that famers will actively choose to teach themselves given the opportunity and this is where Access Agriculture comes in - anyone can have access to quality farmer-to-farmer training videos in international and local languages.

About Access Agriculture 

Agricultural advisory services in developing countries face many challenges, one of which is to respond meaningfully to farmers’ diverse demands for advice on crop, livestock, fish, processing, business, finance and marketing issues. With limited resources advisors struggle to reach the millions of farmers.

In building resilience and adapting to climate change, maximizing the use of available resources, understanding the dynamics of their local environments, education and inclusion of women and youth in rural enterprise and value chain development, Access Agriculture acknowledges the necessity to generate synergies with other organisations and forges new pathways for rural families to stay on the farm and attracts new producers to farming and food-related businesses to achieve sustainable and inclusive development in agriculture across Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Access Agriculture has trained many universities, national extension services, national farmer organizations local NGOs and some CGIAR centers, to produce agricultural training videos.

The videos hosted on the Access Agriculture website are accessible in different formats. A transition from video CDs to DVDs and currently 3gp has helped widen the scope of access by various users in many locations around the world. All videos hosted on the Access Agriculture website embed adult learning principles and provide a mix of science and local innovation/knowledge in an easy to understand language and illustrated with clear, inspiring visuals.

Many of the videos capture topics not normally available in the “traditional research community”, as such offering a diverse basket of multimedia support tools to train rural people on agricultural enterprise development, sustainable agriculture and natural resource management. 

Currently, this world-leading online platform has 175 videos of quality farmer-to-farmer training videos (mainly on agroecology and food processing) in seventy-five international and local languages which have free access to view and download for everyone.

Photo credit: Access Agriculture