Although the first Featured Forum finished on July 21, we have had several emails commenting on the summary and people's impressions of the forum. Therefore we have decided to leave this thread open for community members who have further comments to make. Thanks for a great forum! Nate Heller e-agriculture.org

Improving Information Access for Farmers: How Can This be Achieved? In last week's discussion participants debated the major factors in improving farmers' information access. Some of the questions for this week's discussion include: - What are the different important elements in enabling access at the front and back ends (i.e. getting the information into the system, and making sure farmers can access the system). How do these vary depending on the different kinds of information demanded? How do these vary depending on different demanders? Examples? - How can the private sector get involved in e-agriculture? What are some examples of successful private initiatives or public-private partnerships in e-agriculture and what made them successful? - What are the key factors in successful information management policies and strategies for agriculture? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Here were some major points made last week, many applicable to the above questions: KEY FACTORS IN IMPROVING ACCESS - Communicating/packaging/delivering information effectively, Recognizing the different circumstances farmers face and building systems flexible enough to handle these. Federico Sancho mentioned four key areas: livelihoods and conditions, information needs, languages spoken, and means of accessing information (internet access, literacy, mobile coverage, etc) Bruce Ningakun made the point that a major focus must be put not just on collecting the right information, but on delivering it in a format which is accessible and will be accepted by farmers. - Involving the private sector, rather than just the government. Winston George argued that often it is difficult for rural stakeholders in many countries to hold their governments accountable and that when service delivery and funding are unsatisfactory, it can be difficult for stakeholders to do anything about it. Involving the private sector can sometimes shift the incentive structure and improve the situation. - Strong leadership and a long term strategy- several participants mentioned that often e-agriculture projects fail because they are not well planned and there is a focus on ICTs for their own sake or for political showcase purposes, rather than on making sure the end-goal of the project is improving people's lives. This can mean that funding and leadership are lost when these short term goals are fulfilled. - Winston George mentioned the usefulness of a strong but flexible legal framework and information management policy, which will outlast changes in government officials. - Other factors mentioned were capacity building, involving the entire staff of projects in the use of ICTs from the start, so they understand and buy in to their use, and using ICTs to improve back-end information processes. Federico Sancho also mentioned that we should look at information as a "perishable good' and make sure we understand its entire chain of being, from information producer to information consumer. - Paul Sillu said we should tackle e-Agriculture on a regional basis to facilitate different regions learning from one another. CHALLENGES FACED - Winston George argued that governments are often not accountable enough in providing agricultural services, and that stakeholders can't do much to improve their quality or level of funding. - Ben Addom mentioned that the research-production link is completely different in developing countries than in countries like the US, where most research is done commercially and paid for by farmers, rather than the government. - Several participants mentioned poor infrastructure (power, communications, roads) as a major difficulty, and Md. Mazrul Islam said that often it is difficult to even determine through which channel one can give farmers information- TV and radio are too expensive, extension visits are too infrequent , internet is inaccessible, mobiles are often not used for agricultural information, and illiteracy and cost make newspapers unviable. - Many Governments lack data and information management policies, and some even consider a Freedom of Information Act to be the same thing as an Information Management policy. - Often the importance of information has been neglected as a factor in improving farmers' lives, and therefore it receives less funding and priority than it should. - Other challenges mentioned were lack of political will, lack of senior management support for e-Agriculture projects, lack of funding, poor legislative frameworks, lack of human resources capacity, overambitious and politically motivated projects, and resistance to change OTHER KEY POINTS The major types of information mentioned were market information, weather information, and technical information for production and processing. Information was seen as crucial to helping farmers improve food availability and to market their goods at their true value, rather than letting other actors such as traders undervalue their products. Several methods of access were discussed. Paul Sillu mentioned Computer Information Centers, such as those in a USAID project in Kenya, online services, such as eadairy ([url]www.eadairy.com[/url]), and e-sokoni, and information centres run by successful farmers, who are already trusted by other farmers and therefore better equipped to pass information to them. Joel Sam mentioned radio call-in shows.

dear issah

[url]http://www.e-agriculture.org/98.html?&view=single_thread&cat_uid=1&conf…] Innovative Information and Communication systems- What innovations work and why? In this thread we heard about many different systems and what makes them work. Major topics of discussion included: Systems to share knowledge between agricultural researchers - Systems for sharing agricultural information between researchers at the national and regional levels, such as AARINENA, were discussed, and several innovative methods, such as the Western Asia database of agricultural researchers, and the NARIMS information management systems and the NERAKIN knowledge and information network, were mentioned. - Also mentioned were the SIDALC system in the Americas, which shares content between 141 institutions, and UNICOOP, a network of university institutions in the Americas focusing on small cooperatives. - Problems mentioned in this type of information sharing were that national systems are quite varied in their information management capacities and often lack incentives to digitize information or share it. Systems such as NARIMS, which facilitate these processes, have not been very widely diffused. - Taraneh Ebrahimi said that "the main issue which I have found during my job, is the strong relationship which should be developed between national and regional levels. I have found that without a strong National Information System, you couldn't have a strong [Regional System]. Weak communication and Knowledge sharing systems is a big problem which you can see at the NAIS and RAIS.' Systems to help farmers access information - Many e-Agriculture systems focus on using ICTs to support farmers' existing sources of information, such as extension agents and radio stations - One method of support mentioned was the linking of research and extension services, through systems such as the VERCON in Egypt, and CTA's SADC question and answer service. Clare O'Farrell mentioned that increasing the capacity of research and extension to interact and their ability to help and influence one another can change both for the better. Success factors mentioned were 1. ensuring that systems really created incentives for all parties to participate and 2. efficient management for quick addressing of problems. - Other systems focus on helping farmers to access information directly. - These included the Kubere Information Center, in India, e-Seva, which helps farmers access government services and could be used for agric content, and the IVRP, run by the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation, which has created access points for agricultural and other information. - Capacity building is a major issue for direct access. - Other factors are 1. trying to make systems as easy to use as possible (for example, putting them into local languages) and 2. making them accessible through systems farmers already use, such as SMS. Systems for sharing farmer-generated information - Peter Ballantyne and others pointed out that we need to remember the value of farmer generated knowledge, and ensure that information sharing is not a one-way street. - Several participants mentioned that in many situations, such as Zablon Wagalla's promotion of jatropha curcas, information sharing at all levels is possibly the most important factor in the project's success. - Dorothy Okello mentioned that infrastructure (access to power and connectivity) is a major barrier. - Gender bias was mentioned several times in relation to access to information and ability to communicate QUESTIONS FOR THIS WEEK: - What are some successful solutions people have seen to try to solve the problems faced by agricultural research networks? - How can systems (research, extension, others) be properly incentivized? - How can infrastructural barriers be overcome? What are innovative methods that systems have used to overcome it? - Does "agricultural development depend entirely on information given to farmers'? Are market issues also important? - What are innovative ways people have heard of gender bias being overcome? Some Systems mentioned - AARINENA ([url]www.aarinena.org[/url]) - CELAC/BROSDI ([url]http://www.celac.or.ug/[/url] [url]http://www.brosdi.or.ug/[/url] ) - e-Seva ( [url]http://esevaonline.com/[/url] ) - GAINS ([url]www.gains.org.gh[/url]) - IVRP ([url]http://www.mssrf.org/[/url]) - PRAIS (CTA SADC Q+A System) ([url]http://www.uovs.ac.za/faculties/content.php?id=3475&FCode=12&DCode=431[…]) - Prolinnova/IFAD/ILEIA ([url]www.prolinnova.net[/url]) - VERCON ([url]http://www.vercon.sci.eg/Vercon_en/vercon.asp[/url]) - WOUGNET ([url]www.wougnet.org/[/url] [url]http://kic.wougnet.org/index.html[/url] )

Dear e-Agriculture.org Community, Today is the end of the first week of the first e-Agriculture.org Featured Forum. At this point we have had over 60 posts to the various sections of the Forum from over 20 countries from all over the world. We have had a lot of very interesting posts and we really want to thank everyone who has written in. We would love to hear from more of you. We will be getting a summary of the week's comments to you on Monday, but for now, just a couple suggestions. - Please put a specific subject in the title of your posts. Many users have been responding to other posts without writing a new subject line, and therefore many posts have titles like 're: Innovative Information and Communication Systems,' which say nothing about the topic of the post. If your post is a direct response to someone else's post, this is an appropriate title, but if you are discussing a new topic, it will be much easier for other community members to know if they would like to respond to your post if they can see what the topic is before reading the post. We have already changed the subject lines of some posts. - We have been trying to organize posts into threads by overall topic. We hope this has been helpful and not confusing to those of you whose threads have been moved. - Finally, we have heard from some individuals who asked why they had not been receiving posts to their email inboxes. This feature is not automatically enabled, and you need to enable it yourself. To do this: 1. log in to e-agriculture.org 2. go into the forum (Click the link in the middle of the www.e-agriculture.org homepage that says 'Participate now in the e-Agriculture Forum') 3. at the top of the Forum page, click the link with the little house next to it that says profile. (DO NOT click the link on the left column that says 'edit my profile,' it won't work.) 4. scroll to the bottom of the page, where there is a section titled 'Forum Preferences.' Here you can check boxes for the conferences for which you want posts sent to your email inbox. If you follow these steps, new posts will then be sent to your email inbox. However, it is still only possible to post by entering the forum and posting there. If you respond to posts by email, it will be received by the e-agriculture.org team, and we can put your post up manually, but posting directly to the Forum is preferable. We hope this is helpful. Thanks Nate Heller e-agriculture.org team

Hi everyone, I hope you are finding the discussion interesting so far. We have had quite a few very interesting posts and are looking forward to hearing from even more of you. You may notice that some posts have been moved around into different threads. This is an attempt to put posts on similar topics into the same thread. Some users suggested that they weren't sure which thread to respond to. We have therefore tried to consolidate posts into single threads on each topic. Please feel free to start a new thread if you are writing on a new topic, but first look to see if the existing threads cover the topic of your post, and if so, post in one of them. Thanks Nate Heller e-agriculture.org

Thanks for this post, Janaki. We have planned to talk about making content demand driven next week, but this is an interesting lead in to that. It is quite difficult to make content demand driven without discussing what types of content are demanded. In other threads market information has been mentioned quite a bit. What other kinds of information are highly demanded?