12 August 2016. In November 2015, Jeff Bentley and Eric Boa worked with facilitators from ICRA and CTA in a two-day writeshop with some 40 people from Africa and Asia, helping to turn their experiences with video into short, written stories. The stories are captured in A Passion for Video, which celebrates the creativity of the many organisations involved in making, translating, distributing, and screening videos.
In these stories we learn how to reach far-flung villages in Ghana on a motorized trycicle, how to inspire farmers while picking one’s way through the Egyptian bureaucracy, and how to make a video with colleagues we love and need (even if we have to cut them out of the final video). We also meet many other engaging personalities, including a villager in Benin who has to deal with neighbors who want to borrow his precious DVD of videos.
Development organisations and donors do have a lot to gain by learning from people’s personal struggles to overcome hurdles along the way; a project is not just about achievements, it is also about finding one’s way around obstacles.
Development projects will benefit a lot from more flexibity in project planning and in listening to what people on the ground really experienced. Too much planning stiffles creativity and rigid, number-crunching evaluation kills passion. And in the end, the readers want more stories about how things really went.
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