The Video Griot project is a cross-cultural collaboration to create and distribute educational videos for adults in The Gambia, West Africa.
Rural Gambians mainly support themselves with farming. Unfortunately, this way of life grows less successful as environmental degradation reduces crop production and water availability. These communities need access to information about new skills so they can improve their quality of lives, but unfortunately many of areas have low rates of adult literacy. We want to provide access to video learning in these areas–for adults who can’t learn from books but still want new skills.
The Video Griot Project is making videos on a variety of skills related to agriculture, food security, health, and small business. In each video a skill is shared through modeling. Gambians in traditional settings use locally available tools to show the basic steps of the skill, one at a time.
They share skills like composting, vegetable gardening, and soap-making. Skills to help everyday people change their daily lives for the better. Gambia has a number of different tribes with different languages so the videos are being made in English first and then dubbed into local languages.
The project began in 2015 with a 6-month recording trip to The Gambia. At this point, All filming was completed and the videos are in the production phase. If you are a video editor and would like to volunteer to help, please contact VideoGriotProject@gmail.com.