Access Agriculture’s innovative delivery model

Friday, June 30, 2023

Access Agriculture’s innovative delivery model

Access Agriculture employs a unique model for last-mile delivery by engaging young entrepreneurs as Entrepreneurs for Rural Access who facilitate village video shows using mobile smart projectors. In these shows, rural communities learn, discuss, and implement practices showcased in the videos. The smart projectors enable the Entrepreneurs for Rural Access to grow their enterprises and add value to their services by incorporating videos into workshops and outreach sessions.

To ensure the impact of videos, Access Agriculture has created a network of partners that download, share, and monitor them. Over the past decade, Access Agriculture videos have been utilized by more than 5,000 organizations, reaching over 90 million people —including the public and private sector, TV and radio stations, or other digital service providers.

Collaborative efforts between organizations like Access Agriculture and ICARDA demonstrate the scalability and impact of such initiatives.

In 2020, Access Agriculture partnered with the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) to facilitate technology dissemination with the Innovative Agriculture for Smallholder Resilience project, which is funded by BMZ and administered by GIZ-FIA, the Fund for International Agricultural Research. The project under the leadership of Bezaiet Dessalegn is running in Egypt until the end of 2023 (see Water innovations that work | ICARDA).

Three farmer-to-farmer videos were produced that focus on the core technology and

innovative solutions, including the raised bed technology, crop rotation, and land consolidation. The video production relied on the farmer-to-farmer approach which allows farmers to share important knowledge based on their own experience and in their own words. The farmers not only explain the solutions but also describe the challenges well so that fellow farmers watching the video can adapt the technology to meet their own needs. The video production also involved desk reviews and research, key interviews with experts, and running small group discussions among extension workers and lead farmers on selected video topics.

This process is critical to get farmers to appear on camera and who can share their local innovations and help future farmers overcome similar challenges. Working alongside ICARDA scientists, local video teams trained by Access Agriculture ensured that scripts are peer-reviewed and that the voices of rural women and youth were always included. To date, the videos have been watched by over 50,000 people in six governorates.