Willing to partner with atelier Performances and support its work? Below is information about what we do.
Eighty percent of Burkinabe people live in rural areas and work in agriculture and farming. Improved techniques and innovations are passed from community to community through conversation and it may be months before new skills are put to use. Techniques are not written down and, therefore, information can be lost due to the limits of human memory.
Performances is a self-made enterprise which learns from its own experience as it grows year after year. Social entrepreneur Jocelyne Yennenga KOMPAORE started the organization in December 2004. Performances started its activities in 2006 with a laptop. Its strategy and activities with rural communities is considered visionary and relevant.
Performances is founded on the ethos that everyone has knowledge, anyone can learn this knowledge, and everyone benefits when knowledge is shared. Therefore, Performances sees value in knowledge gained outside of a formal education. With Farmer Associations and NGOs as its clients, Performances works to capture the local knowledge existent in rural communities. Through transforming this information into an affordable product, Performance blends enterprise with necessity. Information is made more accessible and it can be easily given to others.
Through the process of capitalization – research, interviews, and the creation of content – the knowledge gained from an individual’s experience is transformed into learning materials for other communities.
Performances then disseminates this information through different mediums:
Material Development
Performances transforms an individual’s story into audio-recordings, creatively designed brochures, books and artfully produced films.
Workshops Facilitation
Performances hosts workshops on materials that they have produced.
Literacy Promotion
Literacy is an essential component of education. Yet, many children in Burkina Faso do not read. As part of an effort to encourage literacy at an early age, Peformances has created The Kombi and Komba series. Kombi and Komba’s objective is to get children excited about reading at an early age by creating children stories relevant to Burkinabe youth.
Communication is an artform. There is value in each individual’s experience and there is a collective benefit to sharing these experiences with one and another. At Performances, we work with the client through the entire process of collecting their story and designing an innovative and artistic medium through which to display its significance. We are constantly striving to improve our methods and we are not afraid to try new techniques in order to portray our client’s experience in the best possible way.
Performances blends all three definitions to produce an affordable product capturing the local knowledge and experience of Burkinabe communities at an accessible and affordable price for all.
Knowledge Capitalization:
Our ethos rests on the belief that knowledge comes from daily experience and anyone with an open mind can increase their knowledge base. We do not confine ourselves to the belief that knowledge only comes from inside a classroom.
Nor do we define our clientele by their level of education. We see value in the knowledge and daily experience of rural communities outside whose residents may only have a limited formal education. Eighty percent of Burkinabe people live in rural areas and work in agriculture and farming. Improved techniques and innovations are often passed from community to community through conversation and training workshops. Often this information is not written down and it may be weeks or months before the individual applies the new skills. It is clear that the agricultural communities can benefit greatly from communication tools, but traditional publishing and communication agencies tend target only urban populations or wealthy clientele excluding a huge portion of the population.
Performance takes a unique approach and chooses to target both rural communities and urban centers transforming the knowledge and experience or the individual or organization into different forms of multimedia through a process called capitalization.