From May to July of 2015, 953 people took an on-line survey to evaluate Access Agriculture and its services. The survey was available in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, to include as large an audience as possible.
Respondents from 102 countries answered the survey, from Africa (63%), Asia-Pacific (23%), the Americas (6%), Europe (3%) and some who work on more than one continent (5%). Most users (56.1%) watch the videos on the site, followed by about a third who download them. Respondents use the videos to train themselves (45%), farmers (38%), colleagues (21 %), students (15%) and for “other” uses (9%).
The sectors that are most likely to use the videos in farmer training are: national or local NGOs (53%), followed by farmer organisations (47%), radio & TV broadcasters (45%), and government extension (43%). Nearly a quarter of the respondents share the videos with other organisations; they listed 435 organisations by name, although many other organisations also received videos.
Nearly all (79%) of the respondents find the videos and the website very useful, and they tend to use the videos for training two to five times a year. Over 800,000 farmers watched Access Agriculture videos in meetings with the respondents, their institutions or their partners. By a conservative estimate, at least 42 million more viewers watched some of the videos on TV, or listened to radio broadcasts, using the audio tracks of the videos.
The top four uses of the videos are: showing them to small groups (34%) and to communities (15%), using the videos to get ideas for extension activities (23%), and watching the videos on cell phones or tablets (12%). We are not sure how many people were watching videos on cell phones four years ago, but it was certainly much less than now, especially in Africa.
Two-thirds of the respondents want translations of the videos, into Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, Swahili, Bengali, Luganda, Portuguese and many others. The respondents like the videos for their simplicity, high-quality images and sound, their narrations and the topics which are useful for real farmers.
To get a copy of the report, please contact the Access Agriculture M,L & E Officer, Nafissath Fousseni Barres (Nafissath@accessagriculture.org).
