FLD experience within Prolinnova

Prolinnova (an ngo-facilitated international programme in several countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Pacific - www.prolinnova.org) aims to promote local innovation in ecologically oriented agriculture and natural resource management (nrm). Its focus is on recognizing the dynamics of indigenous knowledge and learning how development agents can strengthen the capacities of farmers to adjust to changing conditions.

As part of these efforts, Prolinnova partners (in each country including government, research, education, and extension organizations) aim to explore Farmer led documentation (FLD) and support the implementation of good documentation practices.

First experiences being very promising (a/o using ICT such as digital video) a need was identified to take stock of innovative experiences elsewhere and assess their potential in strengthening Prolinnova’s efforts. A workshop was therefore organized in November 2006 together with Pelum Uganda and Oxfam Novib to review those experiences and build the capacities of participants to use these in their programmes.

Examples

Two examples of FLD projects from Prolinnova partners are:

• Using still photography: Farmer support Group (South Africa): In this method, farmers are using still photography and weather instruments to record weather conditions (rainfall and temperature), different growth stages and harvesting and to monitor and evaluate their activities such as land preparation and planting. In the opinion of the farmers, documentation through pictures is good to maintain memories of the past and as encouragement to continue good practices. It helps illiterate people, since it is easy to make and watch pictures. Through the photographs, farmers can easily recognize if a plant has a problem and how they should act upon that. The pictures can be used as a learning tool in farmer-to-farmer extension.

• Participatory Video (PV): Association of Church Development Projects (ACDEP), Ghana: In Ghana farmers are involved in filming their experiences and practices. They determine what is to be filmed, where the activities are to be filmed and who will conduct the interviews. These processes are however, facilitated by the extension staff who took part in a Participatory Video Training (Prolinnova, 2004), while a professional video crew carry out the shooting. The video documentation has successfully been carried out in 15 communities in Northern Ghana. The communities were enthusiastic about using participatory video as a means to enhance their learning and share their experiences. Some challenges were the illiteracy and difficulty to learn camera manipulation, editing limitations by farmers and seasonality of farmers’ other activities.

Future plans

In the overall Prolinnova budget for 2007-2009, an amount has been reserved for integration of FLD into Prolinnova activities. These funds will be distributed among Prolinnova country programmes to implement FLD pilot activities within the national programmes. At this moment Prolinnova is preparing guidelines for submitting country proposals to start with these FLD pilots. Partners will be encouraged to look at feasibility of FLD, e.g. through focusing on more traditional documentation methods already in use or through finding innovative ways to make ICT-enabled documentation methods sustainable.