The Listening Post is a project by Farm Radio, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with the aim to put the farmer as a leading actor in the agricultural development. The vision is to have a two way communication between policy-makers, NGOs, extension officers, agricultural researchers and the farmers in their fields. The goal is to ensure their initiatives are responsive and accountable to farmers. The Listening Post is an interactive radio series aimed at an audience of farmers. The project uses mobile phones, multimedia and FM radio to build a two-way communication...
In 2011, the Kenyan government launched the Kenya Open Data Initiative, making key government data freely available to the public through a single online portal. Kenya Open Data is an initiative designed to make developmental, demographic, statistical and expenditure data available in a useful digital format for researchers, policymakers, ICT developers and the general public. The data is divided in categories such as agriculture, energy, water, infrastructure, health and governance, among others. Agriculture is central in this project as agricultural and rural development can only be...
Event: Commonwealth ICT Investment Forum for Emerging Markets Date: 10 – 12 April 2017 Location: Dubai, UAE Description: 20% increase in ICT investments will expand the GDP of a country by 1 percent -Global Connectivity Index (GCI) 2016. It is clearly evident that the need for major investment in...
The G20 Agriculture Ministers’ Declaration 2017 "Towards food and water security: Fostering sustainability, advancing innovation" published after the meeting held on January 22nd 2017 in Berlin, acknowledges the importance of ICTs for agricultural development, following the discussion on ICT in agriculture initiated at the G20 Agriculture Ministers’ Meeting in Xi’an in 2016. The Agriculture Ministers acknowledged the potential of ICTs for improved food chain efficiency, productivity and sustainability of agriculture, improved animal husbandry practices and for adaptation and mitigation...
Gender Agribusiness Investments for Africa is now accepting applications from institutions and enterprises for the 2017 AWARD AgTech Innovation Challenge for West and North Africa. GAIA has been launched by African Women in Agricultural Research and Development (AWARD) to increase agribusiness investments in technological and business model innovations that help bridge the gender gap in African agriculture and particularly those that enhance the positive participation of African women in agricultural value chains across the continent. “Women face gender-specific constraints that reduce their...
Join the HSRC Annual innovation and development lecture: Interrogating agricultural innovation systems from a small farmer perspective. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) over 1.3 billion people, or about 40% of the global work force is employed by agriculture. About 90 percent of the world’s 570 million farms are owned and operated by families. Most of these farms are small and are found in the rural areas of the developing world, where 75% of the population is employed in agriculture. But with the increase of the world's population and the advent of climate...
Date & Time: 02 March 2017 - 12:15 Duration: 1 hour 45 minutes Venues: Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town or watch online at: https://www.youtube.com/user/aerasmusable/live . Description: This lecture will explore how small-scale farmers are integrated within an Agricultural Innovation System (AIS...
Grameen America announced a collaboration with Citi and Mastercard to provide financial technology solutions that will assist low-income minority women entrepreneurs. The aim is to improve the organization's ability to promote digital financial access. The project will target more than more than 86,000 low-income minority women entrepreneurs across the United States. The most important advancement in the project will be a cloud-based Management Information System that will allow Grameen America to modernize and standardize its back-office processes. The new system will allow the employees to...
The Plantwise Knowledge bank developed by CABI is an online and offline platform and app on plant health information and services. The website provides three different tools: search tool to identify pest problems, a search tool to find factsheets on pest problems, a map of pest distribution and a customized alert on pest news. The "Identify a Pest Problem" search tool invites you to select your location by country or region, then select a crop, and finally select the plant part affected. The results page shows the user a photo of the pest problem on one side and the symptoms on the other side...
A recent article by Business Insider points out that Internet of Things (IoT) is on the rise in agriculture. The current world population of 7.3 billion is expected to reach 9.7 billion in 2050, according to the UN . The world will consequantly need to produce 70% more food in 2050 than it did in 2006 in order to feed the growing population of the Earth, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN. Farmers will need to turn to new technologies to meet the growing demand for food production in the world. Internet of Things is the internetworking of physical devices that have...
Event: Commonwealth ICT Investment Forum for Emerging Markets Date: 10 – 12 April 2017 Location: Dubai, UAE Description: 20% increase in ICT investments will expand the GDP of a country by 1 percent -Global Connectivity Index (GCI) 2016. It is clearly evident that the need for major investment in...