3.4. Madagascar: Survival strategies: Participatory video project

Kitty Warnock, Senior Adviser, Communication for Development, Panos London

Learning to use the video camera. Photos: Rod Harbinson

Panos London and communication about climate change

Panos London has been producing information materials on climate change since the early 1990s, to help journalists in developing countries understand and report better on the science, the impacts and the complex international negotiations. Media are the main source of information for most people in the world, and quality journalism and public debate are essential for creating the context in which tough policy decisions can be made and people can make their own choices for adapting to climate change. Panos London continues to support stronger professional journalism: in 2007 it formed a coalition with Internews and the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) to create the Climate Change Media Partnership to support Southern print, radio and television journalists to attend and report directly from United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change summits.

Panos London also works to strengthen people’s own capacities to discuss issues, share their knowledge and ideas, and contribute to important public debates, using different communication tools and methods such as tape recording, radio, photography, the internet and digital storytelling. For example, Panos has worked with members of vulnerable communities to record and discuss their experiences of facing the effects of climate change such as desertification and hurricanes. A photo exhibition based on the former project was recently shown at the UN during a meeting of the Commission for Sustainable Development.

Survival strategies in southern Madagascar: Making the films

Participatory video is another way poor and marginalised people can take control over what is said and shared in their name. Videos are effective tools for stimulating debate within their own communities, and also enable them to speak powerfully to decision makers and other audiences thousands of miles away.

In southern Madagascar environmental change is pushing the poor even closer to the margins of survival. In a project called “Survival Strategies”, Panos London is working to provide the communities of southern Madagascar with a platform to share their experiences, knowledge and coping strategies and to voice their concerns and priorities for the future. One of the project’s main aims is that responses to climate change and future development plans, such as the Madagascar Action Plan, will be informed by indigenous people’s experience and priorities.
Panos’ partners in the project are the Andrew Lees Trust (ALT), an NGO working in Madagascar to empower local communities to increase their self-sufficiency; Living Lens, a United Kingdom-based NGO that uses video to generate new channels of communication between individuals, groups and communities; and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a UN agency which works towards eradicating rural poverty.

Over ten days in March 2008, eight men and women from five Antandroy communities in the coastal region of Faux Cap were trained and supported to plan, shoot and contribute to the editing of six films. Participants worked in four groups and produced a total of six ten- to fifteen-minute films.

“I'm really eager: it’s something that my ancestors have never touched, so now at this point in time we, their grandchildren, are learning; and so it’s going to be a teaching for the small ones and for our children and our children’s children.” – Participant in video project

“The community produced six extraordinary films. They live with no electricity, TV or cameras and yet they took to it with ease and grace, and the films they produced were beyond all our expectations.” – Living Lens, video trainers

Learning to use the video camera

The most serious environmental challenges, the group decided, were variable rainfall that makes cultivation difficult and forces people to adopt new crops or diversify their livelihoods, and more frequent drought and harsh winds – both, they think, exacerbated by deforestation – that are causing the spread of sand dunes and loss of crops and cattle. The films they made show how the communities are using their skills and resources to adapt to these challenges.

The four films that were finally selected for distribution are:

Fishing for our survival: Fishing is one of the new livelihood options for farmers. A fisherman describes the importance of his tools and the challenges he faces, and a fish seller explains her journey in getting the fish to market to secure vital income.

Sorghum: a crop of our ancestors: Sorghum – a crop of Androy heritage that can survive the harsh drought – is being reintroduced. In this film an older woman passes on to a young woman her knowledge of preparing and using it.

Our fight against the dunes: Community members plant sisal and vines in an attempt to stabilise the creeping dunes which are burying their homes and schools.

Chickens are my security: In the absence of any formal banking account or other forms of financial security, chickens are this woman’s life’s investment, and are also the closest thing she can get to health insurance or a college fund.

Showing the films locally and around the world

The edited films were immediately shared with the wider community at a screening event attended by over 500 people. Some or all of the films have been shown since to decision makers and the public in the district and nationally. These screenings have stimulated new ideas and debate and a lively demand for the films to be made available more widely across the country.

In August 2008 at southern Madagascar’s cultural highlight, a music festival, audiences of 3,000 people watched the films over two days, including local dignitaries such as several mayors, local journalists and international development agencies. In December 2008 they were shown to an invited audience of local development decision makers in south Madagascar’s regional capital, in the presence of the filmmakers themselves. A lively 90-minute facilitated discussion followed the screening, as a result of which at least one NGO invited the communities to submit project proposals. Others made suggestions for additional livelihood strategies – for example, smoking fish as well as selling it fresh – while the films also resulted in people demanding more action from the Ministry of the Environment. Copies of the films were distributed for further showings and there was enthusiasm for getting them broadcast on national TV.

The same evening, 800 inhabitants of the town attended a well-publicised screening. TV news bulletins featured the decision makers’ meeting, with some stills from the videos and discussion of the ALT projects. Now ALT is working on a French-language version and trying to get the films broadcast on national TV.

“The films represent an excellent medium for catalysing debate on the development needs of the local population.” – Andrew Lees Trust

The films are also reaching international audiences. A six-minute compilation of the Dunes and Sorghum films was screened twice during the Poznan climate change summit in December 2008, to audiences of policy makers and practitioners. It generated substantial interest and discussion – of the participatory video methodology as well as the content.

Extracts from the same two films were also screened during the Indigenous Peoples Global Summit on Climate Change, a meeting held in April 2009 in Alaska and organised by the United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies Traditional Knowledge Initiative (UNU-IAS TKI) together with Inuit organisations. The purpose of the summit was to help indigenous people to prepare their contributions to the Copenhagen summit in December 2009. The two films will be included in a compilation DVD of “indigenous viewpoints on climate change” to be disseminated by the UNU-IAS TKI to indigenous communities around the world to inspire them to hold their own adaptation discussions; and it will be among the films to be shown at the National Museum and other venues during the Copenhagen summit. The films have also been submitted to a micro-documentary film contest run by the World Bank’s Social Dimensions of Climate Change programme, posted on YouTube, and disseminated on websites.

For more information see:
www.panos.org.uk/survivalstrategies to view the films
www.livinglens.co.uk
www.andrewleestrust.org
www.unutki.org for more about the Indigenous Peoples Global Summit on Climate Change
www.panos.org.uk/?lid=25525 to view experiences of climate change journalists
www.climatemediapartnership.org for more about the Climate Change Media Partnership, which is supporting 40 journalists to report from the Copenhagen summit in December 2009
www.panos.org.uk/?lid=22221 for Panos’ most recent media brief on climate change, Climate Change: adapting to the greenhouse
www.panos.org.uk/?lid=20026 for Desert Voices, a collection of oral testimonies from people living with desertification in Ethiopia and Sudan

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