Digital Storytelling Presentation at RAEIN Africa 3rd Annual Review and Planning meeting 9 to 10 July 2019 by Sourcebranding Digital Agency

The Regional Agricultural and Environmental Innovations Network-Africa (RAEIN-Africa) is an organisation that promotes participatory development of appropriate science and technology for sustainable management of the environment and agricultural production systems.

We provided Presentation to RAEIN-Africa stakeholders who primarily work in the laboratory. The aim was to help the organizations stakeholders see the importance of using Digital Storytelling in building capacity in six SADC countries on LMO detection for informed biosafety decision making using Digital Storytelling.Biosafety is important to ensure that LMOs do not contaminate the environment. There is at International level a prescribed way the LMOs should be handled. To enable countries to abide to the International law (the international; law is a protocol called The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (CPB) countries need the capacity to diagnose if a product is an LMO or not.

The work RAEIN-Africa stakeholders do Is inclusive of diagnosis of the presence or absence of LMO. These are Living Modified Organisms. The results from their lab work informs decision making e.g. whether products being imported in their countries should be abide to certain legislations – called Biosafety Laws, Whether products being produced on the country are abiding to the legal provision of how to work with these LMOs, they also inform internal systems on whether certain products should be labelled if they contain LMOs.

Thus our presentation was centered around why impact stories will be a great tool in contributing to national capacities on decision making on LMOs at policy level, at decision making level and at conservation of biodiversity level.

Our Impact Storytelling presentation followed these outlines:

• Why Digital Storytelling is significant in changing institutional systems by ensuring that the Decisions made on LMO is science informed based on past project stories
• Discovering why Storytelling at Institutional levels is important in incapacitating Institutions projects
• The impact, the existence of the laboratories will have (in the long term) in ensuring biodiversity conservation) through Digital Storytelling.
• Inter-Continent Digital Storytelling with other countries so that they learn from each other based on past projects

Owning to the fact that these were scientists, our presentation was mostly based on how to write an Impact Digital Storytelling, providing examples and showing what the difference is between an Impactful Digital Storytelling and a Scientific Writing.