QR Code Sharing
Inspired by West Africa
The story, in a nutshell, goes like this:
I had a small part in a team working on an agricultural development project that initially focused on 10 countries in West Africa, introducing a new post-harvest storage technology that was simple and quite affordable, even for farmers with minimal daily income. To share/educate people on the technology, a traditional approach was used that is called Train-the-Trainer. Think of it like a teacher in front of the classroom and then all of the students leave the classroom after the lessons and go out and teach other farmers, and so on. It’s dissemination of information/knowledge going viral at a slow and costly pace.
Hired on to the team after the project was rolling along, as the new project manager, was a brilliant man from Rwanda who did his graduate work in the USA. Within months, he put his mark immediately on the project by saying to the principal investigator(s), as they’re called in the grant-writing world, (and I’m paraphrasing) …
As you know, Africans have mobile phones. Most have 2-3 phones so they can tap into different signals as they move around on buses/traveling. [Note: at the time, like it also used to be in the USA, phones were free. You needed to buy credit/a plan to use the phone.] Those phones have bluetooth.
What if we video/record local farmers in local language/custom explaining the ins-and-outs of the post-harvest technology? We do 2-3 minute clips. Compress the files. Load ‘em onto phones of project partners in the countries. They bluetooth the videos to farmers and encourage farmers to share the videos via bluetooth when they are at the market, around the village, town, city, with friends/family, on the bus.
They/farmers know how to use bluetooth. For those that don’t, they’ll learn. With the video clips we’ll reach more farmers faster than through Train-the-Trainer.
He wasn’t wrong. African knowledge immensely improved the outcomes of the project, reaching 10s of thousands of farmers and expanding across the continent with more rounds of funding from a guy named Gates and other donors. Today, it is a self-sustaining venture with local/African-owned manufacturing and businesses throughout Africa that are improving the lives of millions of African farmers.
What does this have to do with MTBeer? Let’s use this example to share/spread MTBeer (yes, I’m aware … it’s only bikes and beer and not about the world’s poor). Below is a QR Code that when scanned, opens up to the website. Put the QR Code on your phone/in your photos file. Then when you’re on the trail, having a beer, talking with friends (safely/Covid), family, stopping to get a to-go pack, at the bike shop, at the trailhead, getting a growler filled … get out your phone and say … “There’s a new independent mountain biking/beer newsletter/journalism project called MTBeer. I think you’d enjoy reading it. Here, scan this and sign up. There are free and paid subscriber options.”
Or something like that.
More after the code … (download/save it)
Turns out, we’ve been working on bringing the African project to Central America. My Rwandan colleague/friend and I are hoping/planning to write a grant proposal that will have us working with farmers on this side of the globe by 2022 (Covid be damned).
Happy weekend, everyone!
James/Jim/Jimmy