Microsoft’s ‘film stars’ inspire change in Indian villages

NEW DELHI — Every other week, 22-year-old Dharmendra Kumar transforms his family’s buffalo shed into a makeshift movie theatre. His younger brother milks their animals and cleans the stall, as Mr Kumar tapes a white paper rectangle to a brown fuzzy blanket on the wall.

About 30 women in saris stream in and bow slightly to Mr Kumar and his family before sitting cross-legged on the floor. The children and babies have light-brown hair — a sign of malnutrition.

The woman in the 10-minute video demonstrates a new farming technique. She is from a nearby village, speaks Hindi with the same local inflection and wears her sari with the loose end draped over her head, just like these women.

This customised video approach was developed at Microsoft Research India after observations that rural farmers were more willing to take advice from people of the same sex, ethnic group and economic position. The New Delhi-based non-profit Digital Green is using the method to train farmers in India and Africa in farming, nutrition and maternal health.

“It’s a unique way of doing really targeted behavioural change,” said Ms Julia Lowe, program officer with Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is helping to fund the scheme.

“It will be particularly meaningful when it comes to more personal behaviour, health practices, household decision-making — things that are really very personal.”

Digital Green was founded by employees of Microsoft Research India, a unit of Microsoft Corp, which conducts research in computer science and software engineering.

India’s government is using the approach in an ambitious poverty-alleviation plan to convince women in 70 million households to plant and sell their own crops. The goal is for them, many of whom live on less than US$2 (S$2.61) a day, to raise their household income to as much as US$1,600 a year.

Instead of sending paid agricultural experts, mostly men, to teach these women farming techniques, the government has enlisted Digital Green’s strategy of making instructional videos starring local women and distributing them to surrounding villages.

Digital Green trains local community members to storyboard, shoot, act in and screen videos. The villages where they work often lack reliable electricity, much less televisions or smartphones, so community members carry sandwich-size, battery-run projectors to show the videos at village meetings on any available wall.

The people who screen the movies, such as Mr Kumar, keep track of questions and how many adopt the new practices to help directors improve the next version. Digital Green has nearly 4,000 videos in 28 languages.

The approach, which relies on existing community networks, is cheaper and more effective than traditional farmer education programmes, said a World Bank report. Microsoft Research, which operates much like a university, tested the method against control groups for about 16 months.

“At the end, it was pretty clear Digital Green was much better,” said University of Michigan’s School of Information Assoc Prof Kentaro Toyama, a member of Digital Green’s board.

The experiments showed that video was seven times as likely as the traditional method in convincing farmers to try something new, he added.

“Reaching out to a large number of poor households is a big challenge for us,” said Mr Alok De, national mission manager of India’s National Rural Livelihoods Mission. “We see that, quite often, the poorest of the poor farmers are somehow left out. Women were never included. So our programme is targeting women and small and marginal farmers. Digital Green will help us reach them in a cost-effective manner.” BLOOMBERG