The 2010 FRI’s scriptwriting competition winner is…

Alice Bafiala Mutombo, an independent radio journalist from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. My congratulations!

She won first prize in an Africa-wide scriptwriting competition on healthy communities organized by FRI.

After the selection of a long and interesting list of 68 proposals, here is the complete list of winners in alphabetical order by country is:

• Kpénahi Traoré, Burkina Faso – Composting human waste is a healthy way to reduce disease and feed the soil
• Alice Bafiala Mutombo, Democratic Republic of the Congo – A clean village for a healthy life
• Gabriel Adukpo, Ghana – A family fights malnutrition with local leafy vegetables
• Simon Mukali, Kenya – Talking to teens about unsafe sex
• Charles Kemboi, Kenya – Empowerment saves youth from drug abuse
• Lawrence Wakdet, Nigeria – Occupational and nutritional therapy for people living with HIV and AIDS
• Oluwakemi Aduroja, Nigeria – Empowering communities with participatory community enumeration
• Ugonma Cokey, Nigeria – Florence saves girls from human trafficking
• Bonaventure N’Coué Mawuvi, Togo – Collecting plastic waste: Cleaning the city and generating income
• Filius Chalo Jere, Zambia – AIDS support program gives positive people a new lease on life

More details on the FRI scritpwriting website.

2010 Scriptwriting Competition is starting

Liliane and I are ready to evaluate the entries for the 2010 Scriptwriting Competition organized by Farm Radio International. This year the topic is “Using radio to share stories about healthy communities“: 68 scripts have been selected to take part to the first round of the competition.

Check the list of participants.

Radio is for everyone

Last week Mr John Cheburet was in Rome with us. It was a very nice experience and I’m sure everyone involved in this experiment got a benefit from it.
As you probably remember, John is the winner of the FRI scriptwriting competition on innovation in smallholder agriculture. His script was a story about how Sawdust prolongs the storage life of potatoes. John is a journalist from Kenya and works for The organic farmer. John usually spends his time in contact with farmers around Kenya, collecting ideas and stories.

This time the approach was a bit different. John spent three days meeting with people in Rome, partly at FAO and partly at IFAD. All of them dealing with agriculture but from very different angles. Very different, one from the other: we meet people dealing with Animal health and rinderpest and those working for CountryStat, people dealing with Plant production and potato (the subject of John’s winning script), gender issues, bees pollination and FAO-EU Food facility. And they were many..

The variety of interests was enormous as John interviewed more than 15 people in just one morning and two afternoons. More than 10 hours of sound, as he calls it, were recorded using a fast and simple voice recorder.

The last morning I asked him the miracle: “John” I said, “this afternoon we are going to call everyone back and we need to give a sample of what radio can do for them. We need to show also what contribution they can give to radio. Can you put together a clip to give a perception of what we have been doing the last two days? Some minutes of recording with the essence of what you and these people said during 11 different meetings.”

John just did it.

Wednesday afternoon we were again in the meeting room to learn how radio and development projects can go together. To give the taste of the power of communication. The power of radio, in the days of the Internet. So simple, so powerful.

And John had a great success. Every participant was extremely fascinated by what he/she saw and heard. Now you can hear it and see it, just as the participants did few days ago!

I think it was a very interesting experiment and would like to have chances to repeat it again, soon.

In conclusion, and above everything else, a very special thanks to John for his energy and enthusiasm.

John Cheburet‘s blog.

The FRI’s scriptwriting competition winner is…

John Cheburet from the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation!!!

John, who is a journalist from The Organic Farmer, won the competition with his script called “Sawdust prolongs the storage of potatoes“!

This experience was very interesting and involving to me. I spent hours reading the tens of scripts which qualified for the latest selection. And it was not easy for me to make distinctions among the best scripts as most of them were really high-quality. The best result was the fact that during all the time I dedicated to this exercise, I was more and more convinced of the importance of this project, of the relevance of the scripts and of the potential benefits listeners can receive from such a communication activity.

Now with my colleague Liliane of FAO, and then with a more enlarged team, we are starting organizing John’s trip to FAO to share with us his experience in the field and work with together on the preparation of future content for farmers.
Compliments John and the other 14 winners of the FRI’s competition.

What a good example of activity and collaboration!

Here is the complete list of the winners (the winners and script titles in alphabetical order by country):

• Felix Houinsou, Benin – Using weaver ants to protect fruit trees from pests
• Issakou Yagui Assouma, Benin – Crush the maize stalk to preserve the grains
• Adama Zongo, Burkina Faso – The pump mill
• Lydia Ajono, Ghana – The miracle local plant “zabila/lelle” or henna plant: The turning point for food security for a smallholder woman farmer in northern Ghana
• Gabriel Adukpo, Ghana – A farmer suffocates stem borers to death and saves his cocoa farm
• Rosemond Ohene, Ghana –  A farmer protects his young oil palm seedlings from rodents with jatropha
• John Cheburet, Kenya – Sawdust prolongs the storage life of potatoes
• Stanley Nyakwana Ongwae, Kenya – Women re-invent hanging gardens technology to solve land crisis
• Rosemary Nyaole-Kowuor, Kenya – Sack farming: Unlimited vegetable harvest
• Fredrick Mariwa, Kenya – A local farmer in Kenya uses water hyacinth to produce chicken feed
• Andrew Mahiyu, Malawi – Innovative farmer uses animal dung to protect his crops by fending off hungry goats
• Gladson Makowa, Malawi – What fattens pigs is still a mystery
• Lamine Togola, Mali – Composting, the best practice for improving soil fertility: The case of Dien
• Assétou Sidibe, Mali – Scarecrows and cassette tapes protect rice fields from predatory birds
• Lazarus Laiser, Tanzania – Transforming bicycles into a vehicle of innovation

Read more details on the FRI dedicated website.

Judging for the FRI’s Scriptwriting Competition

Last week I started a new curious activity: I’m part of the judging panel of the scriptwriting competition on Smallholder Farmer Innovation launched last summer by Farm Radio International.

Actually we are in the phase one of the evaluation process: over 70 scripts were received by FRI and 58 of them passed the initial screening. They have been divided up so each judge got 9 or 10 scripts to review. We now have to go through these entries and select our top 4 or 5 (based on a common judging criteria score sheet). These top 4 or 5 will then proceed to the second round where every judge will review all of the scripts.

More about the competition during the next weeks when I’ll have a better idea on the entries.