Giving Compass' Take:

• Food Tank discusses how social media has helped farmers, young and old, cope with the struggles of farming in Kenya. Through the connection, farmers are able to band together and support one another. 

• How can social media help other aspects of farming? How can nonprofits support farming in developing countries?

• Here's another example of how to use social media for positive change. 

Noah Nasiali, a farmer in eastern Kenya, is using social media to bring together farmers throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Through his Facebook group, Africa Farmers Club, Nasiali is uniting 128,000 Africans to discuss farming hardships and solutions. Since the groups’ origin in early 2018, Nasiali began organizing local workshops about soil testing, seed maintenance in certain climates, and other farming practices led by expert farmers.

Farmers are coming out and telling their stories. We are getting the right information, we have experts, we organize food discussions every week. Either a crop, a challenge that farmers are facing … we have live interviews with experts in the industries and expert farmers. The most important part of it is that it is a farmer-owned and farmer-led initiative, and farmers tend to prefer to listen to other farmers who have experience.

As a young farmer, Nasiali experienced hardships common in farming when one of his clients abandoned a sale during harvest season, leaving him with nowhere to sell 75,000 cabbages. Searching for emotional support as well as advice on managing his excess supply of the crop, he turned to the internet. While he found a few groups designed for discussion among African farmers, none of them highlighted real farmer experiences. “With all these Facebook groups and all this information and all these schools and professors and colleges, how come people are not addressing the plight of the farmer?” Nasiali says to Food Tank.

Read the full article on connecting farmers through social media by Kirby Barth at Food Tank