Final Day in Rwanda

It’s been a hectic day for the last day of the East African Outreach trip as part of the AGCommons program. We had the opportunity to visit a medium sized farming cooperative about 60KM outside of Kigali. The landscape was beautiful but one could clearly see the pressure on the land caused by population and intensive agriculture. The cooperative is very organized like most things in Rwanda. They hire a local extension worker known as an Animatuer  to provide information on best practices to its members and to provide a link between the Ministry, the farmers and the cooperative leaders.  We spent several hours talking about maps, mobile technology and community radio. Everywhere I traveled in Rwanda had 3G mobile coverage. I could have plugged in a wireless modem with a local SIM card and called it an office, almost anywhere in small country.  Between the West & East Africa teams we will have close to 100 pages of raw notes, hundreds of local potential partners, farming groups, technology companies and agriculture officials, and many megabytes of pictures and video. All this will take several weeks to synthesize but we’ll plan on putting everything on the AGCommons.org web site when that’s done. From the Kigali Airport – Jubal Harpster

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