Nouvelles

A while back we featured a video project involving Maasai pastoralists in East Africa shooting their climate reality. The project, Pastoralist Transformations to Resilient Futures: Understanding Climate from the Ground Up, aimed to highlight pastoralists’ perceptions of climatic and environmental changes and their experiences coping with these challenges.

Joana Roque de Pinho, Lindsay Simpson and Nicolas Tapia, researchers and filmmakers from the Colorado State University, facilitated, together with Maasai pastoralists, a three-week long workshop where participants learned to shoot, conduct interviews, create sequences, storyboard and do some basic editing.

Together they used their new skills to create short videos about climatic changes and other aspects of their lives they wished to share. With two simple high-definition digital cameras, the filmmakers worked both individually and in groups. Directing and editing decisions were entirely the Maasai's.

We are now proud to announce that this participatory video project received the Jean Rouch Award for Collaborative Filmmaking last year. The award was handed out by the Society for Visual Anthropology. Named after Jean Rouch, the French ethnographic filmmaker, this award goes every year to film projects that involve local community in their making. All the Maasai filmmakers also received their award certificates.

This initiative was funded by the Livestock and Climate Change Collaborative Research Support Programme (CRSP) with support from the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS).

Watch video for which the project earned the award: Maasai Voices on Climate Change (and other changes, too)

Joana Roque de Pinho, a post-doctoral researcher leading the project, has written about her experiences from working with Maasai pastoralists and participatory filmmaking in this piece, published in "Antrophology Now" last year: Shooting Climate Change in the Maasai Mara - Aesthetics and Expectations in Participatory Filmmaking with Kenyan Pastoralists (PDF)

Learn more about the project on our blog:
- Maasai voices on climate change (and other changes, too)
- Pastoralist voices on climate change
- Watch: East African pastoralists record their climate reality
- Watch all videos originating from this innovative participatory filmmaking project

Throughout history, East African pastoralists have been able to cope with seasonal and annual climatic variability, but with climatic change intensifying in the region, their livestock-dependent livelihoods are ever more vulnerable to increasingly frequent droughts and other extreme events. Learn more about climate change and pastoralism:

- Pastoralism key in managing drought
- Rangeland enclosures could help pastoralists cope with climate variability