VideoGriot – Educational Videos for The Gambian People

VideoGriot was started by Hannah Michelle Grossman, a former Peace Corps volunteer in The Gambia.

Hannah is working to provide high quality videos about such skills as agriculture techniques, small business ideas, and health information for villagers in The Gambia.  The videos will be short (8-15 min), narratives from skilled practitioners showing how to do the skill being taught. They will be created in English and over-dubbed in the local languages (first Mandinka but also likely Fula). Once a set of videos has been created, they will be distributed to villages using microSD technology.  Here’s some information from Hannah:

In the Gambia, I was an agroforestry volunteer. I worked closely with farmers and helped bring them access to new skills to improve their quality of life. Since my return from the Gambia, I have kept close ties with my community. I see rural farmers struggling to make make due with lower crop yields and worse economic conditions. I want to help improve their quality of life. I know that one way to do this is to give them access to learning new skills in agriculture and other economic sectors. I feel that video is a good media for this sort of education as it makes the information available to low literacy groups in ways that can work with farmers’ schedules.

Most Gambian phones do not come with internal memory. Instead, people go to the market and buy microSD cards. By placing the videos on microSD cards, they can easily be transported and played in many different locations. To make the videos more accessible to a greater number of people, they also plan distribution of Raspberry Pi microSD video players which will connect to CRT televisions. This way villagers will be able to watch the videos together around the CRT televisions already available in many villages.

More from Hannah:

When I returned from the Peace Corps in 2002, I became an educator. I was a public school teacher for 6 years and then returned back to school to work on my PhD in Education. I am currently in my 5th year at UCSB. I am interested in helping experts share their areas of expertise with other people and in how cultural perspectives shape learning. In addition to the VideoGriot project, I am conducting my dissertation research while there. This research will look at the thinking processes used in learning from video and trying to optimize video creation for the audience, in this case rural Gambians.

GambiaHELP feels this is a very worthwhile project and will help many villagers in The Gambia.  While VideoGriot works to get their own 501(c)(3) tax exempt status, GambiaHELP has agreed to be their Fiscal Sponsor.  The budget for the VideoGriot project is $20,000.  Please help her with this important project.

Donate to VideoGriot thru GambiaHELP: