Climate Change, Participatory Video & The Red Cross

The Red Cross/Red Cres­cent Cli­mate Cen­tre asked me to teach par­tic­i­pa­tory video to a com­mu­nity of farm­ers of Wage Warage in north west­ern Ethiopia this past fall. Justin Benn of Vivo Media pro­duced a micro-documentary about the work­shop to help the Red Cross repro­duce this method elsewhere:

The goal of the work­shop was to pro­duce inspi­ra­tional videos to help Ethiopian farm­ers col­lab­o­rate with the Red Cross in locally adapt­ing to the risks of cli­mate change. Wage Warage had suc­cess­fully imple­mented numer­ous cli­mate risk adap­ta­tion pro­grams over the course of a year with sup­port from the Red Cross. The com­mu­nity was reap­ing the ben­e­fits in the form of bet­ter har­vests, more sta­ble house­hold incomes and bet­ter work­ing con­di­tions, espe­cially for women.

The Red Cross wanted the farm­ers of Wage War­gaje to demon­strate the ben­e­fits of the pro­grams to other Ethiopian farm­ers so that they would be moti­vated to proac­tively con­front cli­mate change as well. Ethiopia’s con­tri­bu­tion to global cli­mate change is neg­li­gi­ble, but dev­as­tat­ing droughts and soil ero­sion are threat­en­ing the liveli­hoods of many rural com­mu­ni­ties. The Red Cross is try­ing to pre­vent human­i­tar­ian dis­as­ters by teach­ing the farm­ers to adapt to the impacts locally. Par­tic­i­pa­tory Video offers a means of cre­at­ing visual evi­dence and per­sonal sto­ries designed by Wage Warage to reach farm­ers like them. They made four short videos in four days. Have a look:

What is Par­tic­i­pa­tory Video?

Par­tic­i­pa­tory Video (PV) is a cre­ative process where a group or com­mu­nity with oth­er­wise lim­ited expe­ri­ence in pro­duc­ing media makes a video. The process of mak­ing the video is as impor­tant if not more impor­tant than the final prod­uct. This dis­tinc­tion sets PV apart from doc­u­men­tary film or pro­mo­tional media. The rea­son for mak­ing the video is often linked with empow­er­ment, be that through artic­u­lat­ing con­cerns to leg­is­la­tors, resolv­ing con­flict within the com­mu­nity through a cre­ative process, or reach­ing out to sim­i­lar com­mu­ni­ties through medi­ated nar­ra­tive. Par­tic­i­pa­tory Video often hap­pens through a col­lab­o­ra­tion between out­side advo­cates or media mak­ers and the com­mu­nity. Out­side advo­cates serve as sup­port as the com­mu­nity scripts and shoots their videos.

About The Workshop

The Cli­mate Centre’s Pablo Suarez com­pul­sively exper­i­ments with dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­niques to help stu­dents, his col­leagues in the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity and rural com­mu­ni­ties in devel­op­ing coun­tries under­stand the many inter­re­lated facets of cli­mate change. He put together a team to give Par­tic­i­pa­tory Video a try with Wage Warage in Ethiopia with the sup­port of the Inter­na­tional Fed­er­a­tion of the Red Cross and the Nether­lands Red Cross. With a clear intended audi­ence and desired out­comes that matched up with the strengths of the cho­sen medium, the project showed a great deal of promise, and I was glad be part of the team as the Par­tic­i­pa­tory Video trainer. It was a plea­sure to work with film­maker Justin Benn to make the work­shop a success.

I drew heav­ily from Insight Share’s resources in plan­ning the work­shop. Insight Share has some 7 years of expe­ri­ence teach­ing Par­tic­i­pa­tory Video. The exer­cises they out­line have been tested and refined in diverse con­texts. I highly rec­om­mend the free hand­book they pro­vide on their site if you are con­sid­er­ing any com­mu­nity media project of this nature.

The work­shop ran for four days with three groups of farm­ers work­ing in teams. The first day and a half of the work­shop con­sisted of intro­duc­tory exer­cises with the cam­era and plan­ning the short videos. The fol­low­ing day and a half con­sisted of shoot­ing. The last day was given to paper edits and screen­ing raw footage.

Even though the com­mu­nity exists off the grid with no reg­u­lar access to media beyond radio, let alone the means of pro­duc­ing media, the work­shop par­tic­i­pants took to the process quickly and con­fi­dently. They were grate­ful for the Red Cross’ efforts and eager to serve as roll mod­els for other com­mu­ni­ties fac­ing sim­i­lar prob­lems. By the end of the work­shop, the farm­ers were inde­pen­dently going out to shoot B roll and redo scenes they were unsat­is­fied with. Every­thing went remark­ably smoothly despite hav­ing such a short time to work.

Dis­tri­b­u­tion

The video on fuel effi­cient stoves was screened at COP16. The Ethiopian Red Cross Soci­ety is work­ing on dis­trib­ut­ing the films and inte­grat­ing them into their train­ing pro­grams, which is invari­ably trick­ier than inter­na­tional dis­tri­b­u­tion as I found research­ing Sud­den Flow­ers Pro­duc­tions, a youth film col­lec­tive in Ethiopia’s cap­i­tal. The response so far from Ethiopian Red Cross staff has been over­whelm­ing enthu­si­asm. We are explor­ing ways to train local Red Cross employ­ees to run Par­tic­i­pa­tory Video pro­grams themselves.