How Mobile Video Is Helping Africa’s Rural Farmers

Rural farmers in Africa can now learn new farming techniques through simple animations that can be viewed on mobile phones.

Scientific Animations Without Borders (SAWB) is an initiative by a group of scientists, animators and extension tutors at the University of Illinois to create short videos that can be sent and downloaded to mobile phones. Each video features a character demonstrating how to do certain agriculture-related tasks. One video, for example, shows viewers in Africa how to processes the fruits of the neem tree to make a liquid insecticide that can be sprayed on cowpea crops. The neem is a drought-tolerant tree found in many parts of Sub-Sahara Africa.