East Africa Drought and Famine

Sorry for the lack of updates on this site. I’ve been keeping busy with a number of personal and work projects. Here’s a series of brief video interviews I conducted on the Horn of Africa drought that’s still ongoing. The challenge, as always, in producing multimedia for a small institution, is to turn it around quickly so that it remains timely without sacrificing content. We hatched up these interviews very early on last summer, when it was evident that a massive humanitarian disaster was brewing in the Horn. The first interview took about 6 hours to produce, from the film to the production and uploading. The last one, embedded here, took me only about 2.5 hours. Not bad!

The entire series is here: http://vimeo.com/album/1662641

Audio slideshow about Ethiopia’s water resources

My colleague Jason and I put together an audio slideshow about an IRI scientist’s trip to Ethiopia. The scientist, Paul Block, is trying to help he country better manage its scant water resources. He came back with a nice collection of photos for us to sift through and frame out a story. We sat him down in front of our trusty Edirol digital recorder (pictured in the “reporter’s toolkit” section to the right) and had him narrate the piece. We were lucky in that Paul can speak quite eloquently off-the-cuff, so the whole thing took only a few tries.

In areas where Paul didn’t have appropriate photos to tie in with what he was saying, we went to outside sources, including Flickr. NGOs and universities also usually make many images freely available. Click on the image to view the slideshow. Hope you enjoy, and as always, feedback is appreciated.

Index Insurance for Ethiopian Farmers

Our latest web story discusses the new collaboration between the International Research Institute for Climate and Society and Oxfam America, a nongovernmental organization that works on poverty issues.

The organization has enlisted IRI’s expertise on index insurance to design contracts for poor farmers in a remote village in the Ethiopian highlands (larger map). The goal of the project is to improve farmers’ ability to manage drought risks and subsequently gain better access to credit. If all goes well, the two organizations and their local partners hope to export the success to other villages and potentially scale up the program to cover entire districts.

Read the full story by visiting the IRI web site.