Now these groups come back, and they contact us, and they let us know how these
things are being used, and we may never hear from them again.
And that's fine with us.
We're very happy that they're being used in this format.
There's a third group of individuals and
organizations that take these things out, download them, and
they may use them in educational purposes, and we may never hear from them again.
And that is fine with us, too, as long as they'll be taken out and used.
So our connections globally with people with that sort of finished product,
those animations that can now be used for
taking out of the field, are being used in many different ways.
We have many examples of individuals downloading them, taking them out into
their villages and having impact and sending us a video clip,
sending us pictures, contacting us about how people are using these materials.
In some cases, we've had the wonderful opportunity to go out and
visit with these people and see impact.
One example is we produced an animation where we took neem extracts to use as
an alternative, a neem is a tree that is originally from India, but
is grown across many parts of Africa.
And that tree, if you take extracts from the tree, you can take
the water-based extract or an oil-based extract that's now put in water and
spray it on a crop, just like you spray an insecticide.
So we have many examples of groups that have worked with these materials.
One notable one was an individual that downloaded, took it out into the village,
and they decided that they should start reforcing their village in neem plants.
So they started a nursery and started reforcing their village and
these neem seeds, so they'd have this new resource.
We have many other examples of TV networks in local countries taking the materials,
using it in their TV programs.
We're absolutely delighted with this type of approach and
always happy to see those materials being used in different ways.
We have connections with government agencies, for
example, the Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Agency.
We developed content with them.
They took that content, put it on over 600 tablets that
we now deliver to extension agents across Ethiopia.
So that they can open those animations in Amharic or any of the other languages
that we have those animations in and use them in their educational programs.
So, those just represent some of the examples, but what is very fulfilling
about this project is, there's not a week that goes by that I will wake up in
the morning, and I'll get an email where somebody has taken these materials and
used them in ways that we never thought about before.
So we feel very excited to have this opportunity to be
part of a global community, where we can work with global experts
who volunteer their time to help us create that content and
then create the content with many wonderful people from around the world
that dedicate a few hours of their time to put it into local languages.
Many of those people take ownership of that and
take it out of their own communities and use it in their own educational programs.
So what we're really looking towards are developing this network,
this network of people that can now create content, deploy that content, and work
with them to deploy it into environments and situations where it's very early in
these value chains, such that we can have this positive impact on the value chains.
One interesting study that we did within the context of this
was to actually compare deployment of these animations with
just simply sending classic extension agents out into the field and
looking at how many people adopted this given technology.
What was shocking out the other end, it was equal.
So deploying the animations was the same as sending extension agents out to do
the traditional plugs.
However, as we are very relieved,
of course, having extension agents with animations in their
hands were far more successful than either of these individually.
So, our goal is really to develop content that will empower extension agents, NGOs,
other organizations in the field to incorporate these into their educational
programs, to begin talking points with the communities that they're working in, and
hopefully generate excitement to change behavior and
change how people are doing things.
So they can increase their level of output,
reduce post-harvest loss in this particular circumstances, and also,
hopefully change the quality of their lives.