Kavita Devi has spent 50 years farming the way her elders taught her. Until recently, that meant working other people’s land in the northeastern Indian village of Gosaibigha in exchange for 10 pounds of rice once a season. But since July, twice a month she’s been joining about 30 women neighbors in saris who file into a makeshift movie theater in a buffalo shed, where they watch videos from a battery-powered, handheld projector shown on a fuzzy brown blanket hung on a wall. In the videos, which run for 8 to 10 minutes, women from nearby villages demonstrate ways to boost rice yield by spacing the seedlings farther apart and using compost instead of fertilizer. “They look very successful,” Devi says later. “I would like to be one of them.” Since July she’s been leasing a small patch to plant her own crops.
Technology is transforming the way women like Devi farm. In rural India, impoverished women do most of the labor using methods passed down for millennia. About 100,000 (mostly male) government and private agricultural experts roam the country to teach farmers modern techniques. But fewer than 6 percent of farmers have ever seen one, according to the World Bank, and women are often excluded from those training sessions because they lack legal rights to their husbands’ land.
Digital Green, a nonprofit founded by Microsoft (MSFT) researchers, is trying to change that. The group distributes pocket cameras and tripods to local women and trains them to storyboard, act in, shoot, edit, and screen videos demonstrating farming innovations. Because the villages where the women work often lack reliable electricity, it’s all done via battery-powered projectors. Women who screen the videos keep track of attendee questions and monitor adoption of the practices to help directors improve later versions. Using the audience’s peers as actors is particularly important, says Rikin Gandhi, Digital Green’s co-founder and chief executive officer. “Viewers identify with those featured in videos based on dialect and appearance, etc., to determine whether it is someone they can trust,” he says. Villagers will tune out if they see items that aren’t common in their communities, such as a plastic bucket or a watch.
Gandhi, 33, grew up in New Jersey. An MIT-educated rocket scientist, he began to develop the customized video approach in 2006 while working for Microsoft’s Indian research arm in Bangalore. He spent six months watching rural agricultural trainers, then began reaching out to women’s groups in India for help making and distributing training videos. He formally left Microsoft five years ago to expand Digital Green, which now has 77 full-time employees and has helped make almost 4,000 videos in 28 languages. The videos have been screened for about 464,000 people in India—a slow start in a country so large, but a start.
Community members are much more effective than roving experts at teaching farming techniques, according to a World Bank study published earlier this year. Digital Green’s method cost Pradan, an Indian antipoverty nonprofit, $288 a year per village and led to 49 percent local adoption of farming innovations, compared with $605 and 16 percent adoption under the old method. Digital Green, which has an annual budget of $3 million, has run largely on a $13 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “It’s a unique way of doing really targeted behavioral change,” says Gates Foundation program officer Julia Lowe. “It will be particularly meaningful when it comes to more personal behaviors.”
Digital Green is starting to produce videos on nutrition and maternal health. It’s also expanding to other countries, including Ethiopia, Ghana, Niger, and Afghanistan. The Gates Foundation has provided an additional $12 million for the nonprofit in Ethiopia. Gandhi says he’s received $6.3 million from U.S. and U.K. development agencies to fund work in Africa and Afghanistan.
In India, the government’s goal is to more than double the incomes of farming women, who typically earn less than $2 a day. Devi says next year she’ll start planting cash crops such as spinach alongside potatoes and wheat for her family. “I want to educate my children,” she says. “I’ll be in a video someday.”
