Digital tools are making access to information more and more possible, and participatory videos are a great way for farmers to share their experiences with other farmers in their own countries and beyond. In the RFS Uganda project sites, Farmer Field Schools have partnered up with Access Agriculture to get in on the exchanges.

At the 2022 Resilient Food Systems (RFS) Annual Workshop, Eswatini project lead, Lynn Kota, said that, in her experience, “communities learn better from each other than from experts.”

This spirit of centring indigenous knowledge and community learning is central to the RFS approach because it builds mechanisms that will be sustained long after the programme leaves the target communities.

In RFS Uganda, Burundi and Tanzania, facilitated learning is conducted through Farmer Field Schools (FFS) by RFS Regional Hub partner, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO). Facilitated learning happens when farmers take the lead in their own learnings by engaging in activities that are relevant to them, while being supported by facilitators to adopt interventions and new technologies that are useful in their contexts.

With the World increasingly digitizing, RFS is looking to digital tools to support learning and, most importantly, to support farmers.

FAO is spearheading this by investigating e-learning platforms to integrate into the FFS approach, and through the Making Every Voice Count for Adaptive Management (MEV-CAM) initiative, which supports participatory videos for farmers to communicate changes seen in their communities.

Seeing the incredible potential that digital tools have in reaching farmers and engaging youth to take up agriculture, the RFS Uganda team, with help from the local FFS, partnered with Access Agriculture to create a series of farmer-to-farmer training videos to support uptake of sustainable agricultural practices.