Dear Muchiri,
I fully agree with you.
Considering that individuals work in organizations which also operate within a given environment, I would also add investment in building organizational capacity. Among others, organizations, especially public institutions, should have clear mandates to open up the data; have internal processes in place, including clear guidelines for staff to facilitate generation and access to data; and establish collaboration and knowledge sharing mechanism/platforms to facilitate inter-organizational collaboration and avoid duplication of efforts.

Indeed capacity development (CD) is extremely important. CD should take into account the capacity of the family farmers to use the ICT tools (i.e. mobile devices, apps, etc.) and to “consume” the open data or services developed from using open data; capacity of individuals (i.e. extension agents, etc.) and organizations (NGOs, community-based organizations, radio stations, extension services departments,) to develop services or products based on open data for the farmers, and of course on ensuring that an enabling environment (policies, laws, regulations, etc.) that support opening access to data, especially public data, and its re-use, is in place.

To add to your contribution in (c), open data will also make it easier for organizations that serve family farmers to provide enhanced services and support to the farmers. Organizations such as national and international NGOs, farmers based organizations, and other community based organizations can use ICTs to easily access open data and re-package it in formats suitable for their target farming and rural communities. Here I can also see an opportunity for community radio stations located in rural areas. Useful open data (i.e. whether data, pests, etc.) can be used to enrich the content of their radio programmes to the farming communities. Considering that most institutions that generate or gather, process and store data needed for farming purposes are located away from the farming communities, ICTs can make it easy to deliver the data to the farmers and to organizations that serve the farming communities.

Hi Richard,

Under the two soft (human, institutional) constraints, and especially related to institutional, I would also add enabling environment as a key constraint. For example, countries, due to several reasons including security concerns, invasion of privacy, among others, are putting restrictions on the use of drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and if this is not properly done it will impact negatively on the use of drones in resilience related work.

Justin

Towela,

You have raised important issues (challenges), especially the over-reliance on foreign expertise resulting in most countries getting cut and paste policies and strategies; not enough attention paid to the development of capacity to provide an evidence-base for policy formulation (which I believe contributes to continued reliance on on foreign expertise); and little documentation on the policy processes in our countries, which in my view contributes to duplication of efforts and also not not learning from the policy formulation process.

Regards,

Justin