I am working with the agriculture engineers at the University of Cordoba in Monteria Colombia to start a video training program called “Success in Cordoba and Uraba”. In this program we will make videos of extremely poor Colombian citizens who have made a successful first step out of poverty using better agricultural procedures. It is expected that international development personnel will help write the video scripts. Examples of the videos we will make include videos of people who have doubled their income using better cassava planting procedures developed at the University of Cordoba, videos of people who have successfully overcome the technological hurdle of producing 3-10 chickens to producing 50-1000 chickens, and videos of people who have successfully overcome the technological hurdle of producing 1-5 pigs to producing 15-50 pigs. These videos will be distributed to 20 municipios in Cordoba (there are 30 but the 10 agriculture engineers only work in 20) so that other campesinos can do use the same ideas. In these You Tube vocational videos we expect to capture experiences about women’s roles in agriculture and agribusiness value chains in order to shape policies and interventions to recognize and support women’s contribution to livelihood security.
Dr. Paul Rigterink