Documentary & Visual Documentation — FAO Somalia (SCRP Project)

In January 2025 FAO Somalia contracted Veynuus to produce the visual record of the Somalia Community Resilience Project, a World Bank-funded programme implemented by FAO in partnership with the Ministry of Fisheries and Blue Economy. The assignment covered the full scope of SCRP interventions across Somalia's federal member states and Somaliland: completed infrastructure, training activities and community-level outcomes, documented in film and photography over an eight-week period across six administrations.

The scale of the assignment was geographic rather than technical. Puntland, Galmudug, Hirshabelle, South West, Banadir and Somaliland each operate their own security protocols, access requirements and operational parameters. A clearance obtained in one does not transfer to another. Local approvals, movement arrangements and points of contact had to be established separately for each, and each set took its own time to put in place.

Eight weeks is a short window for that. Documentation of this kind is not a matter of arriving and filming; the crew has to be somewhere it is permitted to be, with the people it needs to interview available on the day, and with the sites in a condition worth photographing. Any one of those failing means a return visit, and in a six-administration schedule a return visit consumes days rather than hours.

The subject matter added its own demands. Fisheries infrastructure is functional and often unspectacular: cooperative centres, solar-powered ice-making machines, fish drying racks. Photographing it in a way that conveys what it changes for a fishing community requires understanding the value chain it sits in. Ice matters because of what happens to a catch without it. Documentation that treats these as objects rather than as points in a chain produces a competent and uninformative record.

Veynuus planned the assignment as six coordinated field missions rather than one continuous shoot. Sequencing was set by access rather than by geography: administrations where clearances and local arrangements could be confirmed earliest were scheduled first, so that the slower approvals had time to run in parallel with productive work elsewhere. This is unglamorous planning and it is what makes a six-region schedule fit into eight weeks.

Security arrangements and access coordination were managed across all six administrations as a continuous function rather than as a pre-departure task. Conditions change, and a plan agreed a fortnight in advance has to be re-confirmed close to the date. The team kept alternative sequencing available for each mission so that a delay in one location could be absorbed by bringing another forward, rather than by losing the days.

In the field, photography covered the construction of fisheries cooperative centres, solar-powered ice-making machines, fish drying racks and training sessions. The team documented completed infrastructure to a standard that serves as a technical record as well as a communications asset, since FAO, the World Bank and the Ministry each have different uses for the same frame. Training activities were covered in progress rather than staged, which requires being present at the right point in a session rather than at a convenient one.

Interviews ran alongside, with project leadership and with community beneficiaries. The two sets answer different questions. Leadership explains what was intended and how it was delivered; beneficiaries explain what changed, and their accounts are what makes a documentary about infrastructure watchable. Both were recorded in the field rather than assembled afterwards, so that the finished material carried the setting the work belongs to.

The contracted outputs were a 30-minute full documentary, more than 150 high-quality photographs, a 2-minute social media cut and a 5-minute YouTube version, together with the field interviews conducted with leadership and beneficiaries. The three video lengths are not simply edits of one another. The long documentary carries the programme narrative for institutional audiences; the five-minute version has to reach a general viewer who has not chosen the subject; the two-minute cut has to work without sound and within the first few seconds.

The photographic library was built to be used, not just to be delivered. Frames covering each intervention type across each administration mean FAO and its partners can illustrate a specific component in a specific region rather than reaching for the nearest approximate image, with coverage planned against the programme's own reporting structure.

Post-production ran against the fieldwork rather than after it, with material from completed missions logged and assessed while later missions were still in the field. That is what allowed gaps to be identified while there was still an opportunity to fill them.

Despite the logistical and security demands of working across multiple administrations, Veynuus delivered all contracted outputs on time: one 30-minute documentary, more than 150 high-quality photographs, and coverage of six regions within eight weeks, alongside the short-form video versions and the interview material.

The documentary and photo library now serve as the official visual record of the SCRP project, documenting its impact on fishing communities across Somalia for FAO, the World Bank and the Ministry of Fisheries and Blue Economy. That status has practical consequences: a project with a complete visual record can report to its funder, brief its ministry counterpart and explain itself publicly from the same evidence base, and can do so after the implementation team has moved on.

Documentation across Somalia's federal member states and Somaliland is an access problem before it is a production problem. The determining capability is the ability to plan and re-plan around six sets of security protocols and approval processes without losing the schedule. Crews that can film well are common; the constraint is getting them to the right place on the right day.

It also shows what a full visual record is worth to a programme. Photographing every region and intervention type, rather than sampling the accessible ones, produces something the client can rely on years later.

• 30-minute full documentary
• 150+ high-quality photographs
• 2-minute social media cut
• 5-minute YouTube version
• Field interviews with leadership & beneficiaries