Interesting inovations in Africa

A lecturer at Ethiopia’s Mekelle University, Fetien Abay, is committed to promoting gender equality in science. She was awarded a grant from CTA’s GenARDIS programme to pursue her work with Farmer-Led Documentation and ICT for rural areas.Whether advising young women studying agriculture, investigating semi-wild food sources or helping smallholder farmers to share knowledge, Fetien Abay is an energetic champion of rural women.You work with women at the village level. Can you tell us a bit more about what you do? Through various projects, I seek to link academia and rural women. For example, while helping women establish cooperatives for processing and marketing kollo, a popular snack based on roasted barley, for which specific local varieties of barley are highly prized, we encouraged MSc students to investigate safe levels of mycotoxins and related elements so that the women can sell these organic snacks locally and internationally through fair trade.Tell us about the initiative that is the focus of the GenARDIS grant.The project Women Learning Women (WLW): Women-led Documentation and Community Information Centres in Tigray Region, northern Ethiopia, was awarded a GenARDIS grant last December. The aim was to experiment with new documentation methods led by women farmers in order to see whether and how this form of documentation can complement that done by researchers. The project also seeks to motivate women to use telecentres when looking for information.What exactly is Farmer-Led Documentation and why are women important in it? The traditional way of documenting local knowledge and innovation is researcher-led – everything is documented that the researcher feels is important. But to address the needs of farmers, it is necessary to look for other approaches. Farmer-Led Documentation (FLD) is farmer-driven, in that farmers are involved from the beginning in deciding on the purpose, i.e. why, what, when and how to document. Rural women have less mobility than rural men and their innovations normally receive less recognition by people both inside and outside the community.hat forms of communication are used for FLD and what types work best? Approaches used include training in photography and computers – including use in local languages – and tape recording. For example, in one village a female journalist made recordings on audiotape, and then played it back to the women innovators, so that they had control over the information. The audio recordings were then broadcast via local radio. Local youths have been trained how to take photographs with a digital camera to document the innovations that the women and others in the community wanted to capture. What kind of women are involved in this scheme? The digital revolution has not yet reached the villages of Ethiopia, and women are left out unless projects like ours, that focus on them, are introduced. We target both literate and illiterate women. We also had a grant from PROLINNOVA-International targeting illiterate women in central Tigray. This project used radio recording and photography, while literate women have been involved in computer training, especially secondary school dropout students. How and where is this information used? It can be shared from farmer to farmer, village to village, district to district, region to region, and vertically from village to development agents and to high-level government officials. On one occasion, women farmers demonstrated their unique innovations on animal health and veterinary medicines, which was an inspiring presentation.
We are using the outputs of the documentation in village-level workshops to raise the awareness of men and women farmers – in other communities as well – about how local people can use ICTs and other communication methods to control and share information about what they are doing. How are women benefiting from this initiative? It has been encouraging to see how women farmers become motivated when they can take the lead in deciding to document their problems and their solutions. FLD helps farmers develop their own locally adapted versions of sustainable agriculture and restores their pride in their own innovative potential. What difference has the GenARDIS grant made?Experience sharing with other African countries has been very important. It has motivated us to interact both formally and informally. I attended a knowledge sharing workshop in Johannesburg in March this year. Some of the initiatives were an eye opener to me. For example in Mali, farmers have organised themselves and are using the Internet to find out about and purchase improved seed.http://spore.cta.int