Ben is making a very valid point about local knowledge and technologies, but also about the role of national agricultural research institutes and universities as valuable source of locally adapted and validated knowledge.

I think we all agree that there is a lot of useful information out there, but often not accessible. At TECA, we found that a lot of highly relevant knowledge about successful agricultural practices and technologies for small producers comes from projects. When a project ends, the lessons learnt are often not documented in a way that could be useful for extensionists, local NGOs and farmer cooperatives in the project area and beyond. We encourage all those organizations working at field level with smallholder producers to document their experiences and share their successful practices for example on a platform to make them widely accessible for the benefit of small producers. For rural users it will be beneficial to have one or few entry points for accessing practical information from different sources, in different formats (audio, video, text and images), across issue areas and regions rather than having to search on highly specialized platforms, focusing only one format or one specific topic.

Of course, documenting and collecting information is only one step. As you have discussed above, the next step is to disseminate this information in a format that is useful for rural people. In the case of TECA, we partnered with organizations such as the Grameen foundation, which use information from TECA, among other sources, for their farmer help line and community workers.

Andrea