Abdullahi Adi Hussein, a Food Security and Livelihood Officer working for a local NGO, was one of them. “At first I honestly found the idea of shooting video myself very challenging”, he recalls. “But after receiving training from Makmende, filming actually went pretty smooth. I was instructed on how to properly hold my smartphone while shooting, how to adapt to weather conditions like direct sunlight or clouds, where to film and whom to interview. After the filming, I sent the footage to Makmende through WhatsApp. It worked well.”
“Covid created lots of anxiety and tension in my mind”, Hussein continues. “But going into the field and gathering information like this, documenting how my community was impacted, felt like a practical way of contributing to solutions. And the resulting videos portray the real scenario as it unfolded on the ground.”
Helene Boeser, Desert Locust Response Lead at SOS Children’s Villages, the organization coordinating the DRA’s response, wholeheartedly agrees.
The footage paints a vivid picture of what it is like to endure that kind of tragedy.”
“What was also nice for us, was to see the motivation of the staff of our local partner organizations. These are people that we hold dear in our hearts, and normally we would work closely together with them on the ground ourselves, but covid of course made going in impossible for us.”
Giving the local perspective more and more space is a broader movement within the world of development cooperation, Boeser emphasizes.