Thanks Dolores - good points, and indeed very much along 'agreed' role for public sector supporting poor, POs etc in capacity and services. 

Hi Pierre and John,

I like the way you have distinguished between the areas of need and the logic of going about it. One way of looking at it from a PO perspective would be perhaps the following:

1. Advocacy by PO or an umbrella PO for connectivity in the rural areas

2. Building the PO ICT base and skills (whether radio, internet, videos for learning, off-line courses, mobile based services, etc) for PO (core) connectivity, management, and outreach to members - tools and approaches that are needed for this to take place

3. Tools and building approrpiate skills of a wide range of PO members to connect and use of PO sservices, including ICT based services

The discussion thread has identified a number of areas that fit under this.

Riikka

Thanks Pierre for bringing this up. There is also another way of looking at the questions 'what the producer organizations should priortize', and in my view, that relates to advocacy for connectivity, capacity-building, etc vs investmnets by the producer organizations.

Contexts differ, and in contexts with limited connectivity, high costs, the producer organization might best sue its time for advocating for these issues. Whereas in 'improved' contexts, the priorties would center on capacity within the organization itself, servcies for members etc. Does this make sense - if so, do we have examples where producer organizations have been active on ICT related advocacy?

Hi Arnel,

I received a response from DigitalGreen to my query.

Yes, all of our videos are available online for free. Its easier to
search/browse through the videos via our website
(http://videos.digitalgreen.org/) but they're also on our YouTube
channel (http://youtube.com/digitalgreenorg).

Hope this helps.

Riikka

Hi Peter,

You raised use of ICT in disaster preparedness - involving local communities aka farmer groups - and whether it is of any use to communities. In vietnam at least ICT has been used in preparedness. I don't know but suspect ICT is increasingly important in this type of use also elsewhere. In Vietnam, natural hazards - storms, flooding - are linked to climate change, but help with both resilience and adaptation. The following is a cut and paste from Asian Disaster Reduction Center:

"The use of ICT for disaster preparedness and response has been making a steady progress in Vietnam, in particular weather forecasting and monitoring, risk assessment and risk mapping, early warning to communities and people, etc. Moreover, state-of-art ICT technologies have been widely applied such as broadband networking of observation stations and automatic communication by mobile phone, but mostly on an experimental basis.

While good progress has been made for typical meteorological and hydrological hazards such as typhoon and flooding, relatively less progress has been made for landslide, flash flood, and geological hazards such as earthquake and tsunami. Among them, tsunami warning system (towers) has recently been developed in Da Nang city in Central Vietnam, but more has to be done in view of future tsunami risks in its long coastal line. Likewise, disaster preparedness and response capacity could be further enhanced if it would make more use of such ICT technologies as information sharing system among various institutions, remote sensing, imaging system, real-time measurement sensor, etc."

Hi Arnel,

Thanks for the question. DigitalGreen has several vidoes in Youtube but at the moment I do not know whether all the videos are accessible. I'll find out.

Thank you Dolores,

Thanks for bringing up the fact that diverse ICT technology exists and can be tuned to the diverse needs. For example, low cost videos for introducing/building awareness on new production practices or e.g., farmer testimonials on use of new things. Farmer interest groups and the likes have been provided with an access to low cost videos - these have generated interest and discussion, particularly if such discussion has been held in the presence of a resource person. DigitalGreen has good examples of this.