Sharing Agricultural Research

Inserting agricultural messages into popular entertainment can help reach a wider audience and make your message 'stick'.

Research in Mozambique finds that animated videos provide an effective source of information for farmers that extension services can't reach.

Bello-Bravo J et al 2019  

Research led by Julia Bello-Bravo compared the use of traditional communication methods (ideas shared by an agricultural agent through farmers meetings and household visits) with the use of animated videos, to show farmers an improved storage technique for beans.

The study found that the videos were as effective as the traditional technique, a finding which suggests the enormous potential to use animated videos in places where extension services are not available. 

Importantly, the study also found that the animations were effective “regardless of participants' educational or technical literacy, gender, socioeconomic status or geographic remoteness”. p3

The study concludes that “animated videos, shared by smart phone have the unique capacity for most widely, scalably and cost-effectively reaching the widest array of people but, most importantly those most vulnerable populations (women, youth and /or the rural poor) otherwise less likely to receive needed agricultural extension knowledge". 

Some important learning from the exercise:

• Involving the target group in developing the message (ensuring it was addressing a real concern in a practical and realistic way) made it more effective.

• Local dialect voiceovers were used to adapt the video to different groups.

You can read the full article here.

An 89% solution adoption rate at a two-year follow-up: evaluating the effectiveness of an animated agricultural video approach. 2019 Julia Bello-Bravo, Eric Abbott, Sostino Mocumbe, Ricardo Maria, Robert Mazur & Barry R. Pittendrigh (Information Technology for Development).