ABSTRACT
Although postharvest losses (PHL) and its prevention varies across different crops, environments, and countries, there are in some cases key gaps along the production value-chain where educational and/or technological opportunities exist for reducing PHL. While addressing these gaps represents a critical component of many ongoing research programs, a need nonetheless persists for crafting high-throughput systems that not only deliver solutions but also can sustainably adjust any given solution in the face of rapidly changing circumstances. Scientific Animations Without Borders (SAWBO) is one such research program investigating flexible, adaptive, and resilient educational solutions scalable to a diversity of value-chain issues, including PHL. Concretely, this involves creating and deploying linguistically localized animated videos that transfer scientifically grounded, best-practice knowledge to the widest possible audience (literate, low-literate, and non-literate alike) through the ever-widening, world digital infrastructure. Having investigated specific solutions to determine value-chain gaps, SAWBO’s research interests rest in issues of ‘knowledge chains,’ the scientifically flexible, adaptive, and resilient approach it uses to identify, solve, and deploy a given animated solution. This paper describes SAWBO’s research and responses to knowledge chains, which are analogous to and can be in support of value-chains, as applied to problems of postharvest loss.
