Based on demand from its Lusophone user community across the Global South, Access Agriculture has launched a Portuguese-language version of its video-sharing platform (www.accessagriculture.org/pt). The platform is already available in Bangla, English, French, Hindi and Spanish.
With 250 million people speaking Portuguese either as a mother tongue or second language, having the Access Agriculture platform in Portuguese is an important milestone. About 211 million people speak the language in Brazil, but Portuguese is also an official language in six African countries: Angola, Cape Verde, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe.
“Our South-South learning approach is further strengthened with this new site,” asserts Josephine Rodgers, Executive Director of Access Agriculture. “We know farmers learn from each other and our aim is to increase the number of videos to help those smallholder farmers who speak Portuguese.”
Access Agriculture promotes agroecology and rural entrepreneurship through capacity development and South-South exchange of quality farmer-to-farmer training videos in international and local languages.
As Access Agriculture has seen a tremendous increase in the use of its video platform by farmers directly, mostly using mobile devices, the sheer number of mobile users in Brazil (100 million) offers a great opportunity to create impact at scale.
To make this happen and contribute to more resilient and healthy food systems both in Brazil and Africa, it will be crucial to make as many training videos from the platform available in Portuguese as possible, in addition to having the interface of the platform in Portuguese.
With 5 million smallholder farmers in Brazil wanting to improve their livelihoods in a sustainable way, the collection of “farmer-to-farmer” videos from Access Agriculture will be relevant to them as well as their fellow farmers in Africa.
The launch of the Portuguese version of Access Agriculture can be seen as another significant contribution to the current UN Decade of Family Farming. Family farms produce over 80 percent of the world’s food and are therefore the foundation of food security and sustainable healthy food systems (FAO 2020). Their importance cannot be underestimated.
If you would like to contribute to getting more of the Access Agriculture videos translated into Portuguese, please contact: phil@accessagriculture.org
