Podcasting is a method of publishing audio files via the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed to receive new files automatically. Any digital audio player or computer with audio-playing software can play podcasts, or burn them to CD.

Local radio stations can then re-broadcast the podcast to traditional radio receivers, or computers at community info-centres can be used to create audio CDs of the podcasts. These CDs can then be listened to repeatedly if necessary and the quality of information shared remains more constant than word of mouth.

In Peru's remote Andean mountains, information is at a premium. Little advice is available and little support given to local initiatives of any nature. The personnel are simply not there in the municipality and money and logistics make outreach difficult even when it is.

Villages like Chanta Alta only have electricity for two hours a day so mainstream information technology services are not necessarily the best approach.

To address this situation this project is piloting the use of podcasting to get important agricultural information to farmers.

Local farmers do not yet have the means to listen on portable MP3 players so the project has married old and new technology to increase local access. It podcasts twice-monthly updates to eight information centres in the Cajamarca region.

These telecentres, many of which are run on solar power, automatically download the programmes onto CDs to rebroadcast them on local radio stations. Farmers have ready access to radios, so the programmes – like The Archers in 1950s UK – become a major source of agricultural and market information.

The project has found it effective to distribute audio material to local people, who prefer listening in their own dialect to being sent the written word. And each area within Cajamarca is sent information relevant to them.

In Chanta Alta, the podcasts concentrate on cattle-raising husbandry and on dairy production. In nearby Chilete, podcasts are being used to give tips to farmers who have no experience of growing grapes (some of the grape growers are pictured, right).

The project leader, Cecilia Fernandez Morales, told the BBC's Go Digital programme that managers are now training local people to make their own podcasts.

"They have been very popular with local people and now we are receiving more questions from local farmers which we are trying to answer. We are also hoping that the database of podcasts on the internet will be used not just by Peruvian farmers but other farmers in Latin America."

Following on from the success with podcasting in Peru we took on a new challenge in Zimbabwe. Read more ...

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