Beth Cullen

Participatory Video for communicating local knowledge

kmc4CRPs Workshop ILRI campus, Addis Ababa

19th October 2012

What is Participatory Video (PV)?

Communication tool regardless of formal literacy levels- enables communities to take control!

Process: empower communities and act as a catalyst for action & change.

Product: community driven film that conveys issues, knowledge & perspectives

Collaborative rather than extractive

Addresses research fatigue

Influence decision makers

Community analysis

Represents Indigenous Knowledge

Skills development and empowerment

Peer-to-peer knowledge sharing

Catalyst for action & change

PV for research

► PV can be used to involve community members in research processes, community participation helps to ensure relevance & legitimacy of research

► Makes different types of knowledge accessible to different audiences- starting point for dialogue and knowledge sharing and developing a common understanding

► Breaks down ‘knowledge hierarchies’ where only scientific knowledge is valorized

Collaborative

versusTop-down

Excludes views of those being researched/‘developed’

Communicates grassroots perspectives & knowledge

Examples

►InsightShare- Identifying research requirements for sustainable integrated mountain development, Himalayas (www.insightshare.org)

►NBDC- Increasing community representation in local Innovation Platforms, Ethiopia (www.nilebdc.org)

►Digital Green- Knowledge dissemination and training, global application (www.digitalgreen.org)

Challenges

No method is a ‘magic bullet’. Must acknowledge and critically analyze strengths and weaknesses:

►Danger of raising expectations: consider long term sustainability

►Takes time: rushing can result in token efforts at ‘community participation’ which repeat or reaffirm existing paradigms

►Incentives: facilitators should ensure participants get something from the process

►Can be hijacked by more powerful actors whilst appearing to represent grassroots reality: requires awareness of local power dynamics

►People may not want to represent their knowledge/reality/point of view to others, for good reasons!

►In certain contexts (i.e. politically restrictive environments) it may do more harm than good.

Source: InsightShare, 2006

► Community identification of key issues, challenges and solutions- e.g. at the start of a project so objectives are driven by local agendas

► Communicate community perspectives to higher level stakeholders and researchers- for example in Innovation Platform processes

► Encourage local innovation and take research into implementation- can act as a catalyst for action research and collective action

► Monitoring and evaluation- can be used throughout the project life cycle for participatory M&E

► Encourage farmer-to-farmer knowledge sharing- dissemination of ideas and ‘best practice’, link to scaling up processes

Potential uses

10

How could PV could be utilized in the CRPs?

What are the potential challenges involved in using PV?

What support is needed to utilize PV as a tool for research?