Social norms: why women farmers might not be getting ahead despite development support

Project team members visiting farming community in Muzaffargarh to know the knowledge and skills of vegetable farmers.
On International Women’s Day, Bethel Terefe, Gender Coordinator, CABI takes a look at gender-related social norms and how they affect women’s futures in agriculture. Women play an important role in agriculture. Although they rarely control decision-making on family farms, women constitute 43% of the global agricultural workforce and are an undeniable asset to the sector.
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‘Going viral’ – how popular music videos help bring soybean farming knowledge to thousands in Ghana

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Development communication is an important tool for sharing information with small-scale farmers, writes Duncan Sones. Usually, the goal is to reach as many of the right people as possible, that’s to say to go viral with your communication. After all, you want your information to be seen by many and to make the biggest change…
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‘Banana and I’: Sharing the ‘appeal’ of better banana management in Uganda through drama

CABI has worked with farmers to develop a video drama on the subject with five episodes translated into two languages. Created for small scale banana farmers in Uganda with contributions from farmers, the dramas are also performed by farmers themselves to increase their local appeal, encourage more efficient farming practices and ultimately increase productivity for banana growers.
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The Legume Alliance

Reblogged from N2Africa. Back in 2015, a group of like-minded organizations came together to explore the idea of forming an alliance to improve the information provided about improved legume techniques for farmers. The idea of this Legume Alliance was to test a new integrated approach to developing and sharing agricultural information. Farmers did not always…
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CABI’s Dialogue in Agriculture brings experts together to share learning in development communication

At the end of November, CABI’s development communication team brought stakeholders and key partners together in the first event of its kind called - ‘Dialogue in Agriculture: Inclusive and demand-driven communication in smallholder agricultural systems’ - to share learning from recent communication campaigns in parts of Africa and Asia.
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How comics, pop music and drama deliver down-to-earth messages to help African farmers improve their soil

5 December is World Soil Day. Soil is a life source for healthy ecosystems, healthy food and, ultimately, healthy humans. With a growing population, the soil that’s cultivated will have to feed many more people, but it will only be able to do this if soil fertility is managed.
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Story maps: visualizing multimedia development communications

The famous statistician, Hans Rosling, used to say the aim is to go from numbers to information to understanding.  This is the essence of how data should be used, shared and presented. Data can be presented in many different ways but maps are perhaps the best way of visualizing spatial information. As technology has progressed…
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