FEMSCRIPT Participatory Video Project

Nine young women from Bayelsa State, Delta State, and Rivers State were selected to participate in an intensive long-term Action Learning Trajectory programme. The women were familiarised with human rights concepts, acquired basic research skills, and learned how to make small video documentaries. The training used a learning-by-doing approach, combining in-depth training workshops with hands-on fieldwork in the trainees’ home communities guided by professional researchers and video-makers. In the process, the women were encouraged to critically reflect on their own human rights and conflict experiences.

The participating women conducted research and produced their own videos - giving them full control over the information and images produced about them and empowering them to express in their own words what matters to them. The project resulted in nine Video Case Studies featuring examples of women in the Niger Delta who are managing to make ends meet despite the many challenges they face.

Participants also collaborated to produce Daughters of the Niger Delta, a portrait of three ordinary women in the Niger Delta. As their personal stories unfold, viewers see that the environmental pollution in their community is not the only human rights violation affecting their lives. According to the producers, rather than repeating the usual media stories about oil outputs, conflict, and kidnapping, Daughters of the Niger Delta focuses on the strength and resilience of three everyday heroines who overcome hardship and give their children hope for a better future. MIND states that along with empowering the women film makers, equipping local women with research and video skills also is useful in view of the need for more first-hand, reliable information from the crisis zones. Many news reports about the Niger Delta are insufficiently backed by data as even local journalists refrain from entering the area.

Women’s Empowerment, Conflict

In the future, MIND intends to use the project outputs as local awareness raising tools in collaboration with local non-governmental organisations and community based organisations. MIND and its training partner FLL - which helped facilitating the video workshops - also hope to find resources for translating the video footage gathered by the FEMSCRIPT trainees into a condensed 30-minute documentary reaching out to a wider audience (including film festivals and TV channels in Nigeria and abroad). MIND currently has a 55mins documentary, inspired by the FEMSCRIPT project.