Global Plant Protection News

Published in: Bloomberg Businessweek, Dec. 1-Dec. 7, 2014, p.36.

A nonprofit with Microsoft roots helps farmers share lessons

Technology is transforming the way women farm. In rural India, impoverished women do most of the labor using methods passed down for millenia. About 100,000 (mostly male) government and private agricultural experts roam the country to teach farmers modern techniques. But fewer than  6% of farmers have ever seen one according to the World Bank, and women are often excluded from those training sessions because they lack legal rights to their husbands’ land.

Digital Green,  a nonprofit founded by Microsoft researchers, is trying to change that. The group distributes pocket cameras and tripods to local women and trains them to storyboard, act  in, shoot, edit and screen videos demonstrating farming innovation. Because the villages where the women work often lack electricity, it’s all done via battery-powered projectors. Women who show the videos keep track of attendee questions and monitor adoption of practices to help the video directors  improve later versions.Using the audience’s peers as actors is particularly important, says Rikin Gandhi, Digital Green’s co-founder and chief executive officer.  “Viewers identify with those women featured in the videos based on dialect and appearance, etc., to determine whether it is someone they can trust,” according to Gandhi. Villagers tune out if they see items that aren’t common in their communities. Community members are much more effective in training than roving experts according to a World Bank study published earlier this year.

Digital Green has helped make almost 4,000 videos in 28 languages to help about 464,000 people in India become better farmers. Digital Green’s method cost Pradan, an Indian antipoverty nonprofit, $288 a year per village and led to 49% local adoption of farming innovations, compared to $605 and 16% adoption under the old method.   Digital Green is expanding to other countries including Ethiopia, Ghana, Niger and Afghanistan.

Kavita Devi from the village of Gosaibagha in northeastern India has spent 50 years farming the way her elders taught her. But since July she has been joining about 30 women neighbors in saris who file up to a makeshift movie theater in a buffalo shed, where they watch videos from a battery powered handheld projector shown on a fuzzy blanket hung on a wall. In the video, which runs 8-10 minutes, women from nearby villages demonstrate ways to boost rice yield by spacing seedlings farther apart and using compost instead of fertilizer. Devi says, ” they look very successful. I would like to be one of them.”

In India, the government’s goal is to more than double the incomes of farming women, who typically earn less than $2 a day. Devi says next year she will start planting cash crops such as spinach alongside potatoes and wheat for her family. “I want to educate my children,” she says, “I’ll be in a video someday.”