ICT4BXW
An information campaign on a crop disease for subsistence banana farmers in Rwanda
Client: IITA
Services: Design research, co-creation facilitation, learning experience design, creative content production, implementation and dissemination
Partners: Butterfly works, Urithi studio
Context: In Central Africa, a bacterial disease affecting banana plants called Banana Xanthomonas wilt (BXW) is quickly propagating and affecting millions of farmers. In Rwanda, the ICT4BXW project lead by IITA and CGIAR, provides farmers with practices to control the disease, and prevent it from infecting more plants.
Mission: We joined the ICT4BXW project at the beginning of a second phase of development. Building on the prior experience of developing an application for champion farmers to inform their peers on the correct practices to contain the BXW disease.
In this second phase of the project, the emphasis was put on scaling the success and effect of the application. With innovation partners such as Arifu and Viamo, more digital information portal would be developed.
As I just finished writing a report on digital readiness in Burkina Faso, I wanted to focus on including the large number of farmers without access to digital tools and telecommunication. That is why we started working on an information campaign to be printed on posters and booklets. Complementary to the digital services existing, the information campaign provides a wealth of visual informations with limited text to include the less literate subsistance farmers. With the intention to be as complete as possible we promoted the solutions developped by Arifu and Viamo on the printed material.
Once the material was printed, It was disseminated in all corners of Rwanda, handing bags out to champion farmers, who would walk the last mile, bringing the booklets and posters to their own communities. 6months after the dissemination a study on the impact of the information campaign was conducted by IITA and revealed a 98% satisfaction rate on the usefulness of the material.
Click on the logo to visit the website of the project
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Dissemination to the champion farmers
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Production of visual content
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Co-creation with experts
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Material deemed useful after assessment
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![collaboration with Uriti studio for the graphic design]()
Collaboration on graphic design
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Dissemination in rural areas
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Printing of the campaign
Julius B. Adewopo, Ph.D.
ICT4BXW Project manager at International Institute of Tropical Agriculture | IITA
“We engaged the service of Cédric via LinkingPin Africa on a project that was focused on empowering smallholder farmers to improve their production by controlling a major threatening crop disease. Their expertise in problem mapping and co-creating solutions through human-centred design was very pivotal to our delivery of useful products to farmers who are less-inclined to use digital tools for farm level decision-support.”
