Alea iacta est – the die is cast! The design phase is now behind us and a new course for AGCommons has been mapped out. The program will be developed as an Africa-based service bureau providing location specific (geospatial) information technology services to extend the reach and impact of existing agricultural initiatives working to improve the productivity and incomes of smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The soon-to-be-launched bureau is the result of 10 months of intensive work by the program team, and involved a steering committee of subject matter experts covering agriculture and geospatial technology, as well as interviews, consultations and conferences that engaged more than 300 individuals across West and East Africa.
AGCommons operations and services will start up with a base in Nairobi, Kenya. The core technical infrastructure to deliver the initial set of geospatial services, including the ability to host and visualize spatial information, is scheduled to be available by the end of the year.
Over time, services will extend to geospatial consulting expertise (modeling, visualization and cartography), project management and systems development/integration, a technical platform for sharing information across initiatives and delivering information down to the farm level, and a legal IP framework to enable a commons-oriented approach to sharing data and information.
The above graphic illustrates the “cycle” of AGCommons services, with the technical infrastructure that supports and enables the services in the center.
Outreach activities and the Quick Win Projects have shown that the smallholder farmers have a need for location specific information, ranging from advice on the most suitable crops for a particular farm’s soil and the corresponding amounts of water needed (climate and rainfall predictability), to the request for early warning systems and intervention measures to avoid and combat pests and disease … the list is long.
The value added to development efforts by locational information systems becomes all the more evident as such systems are applied to the concrete situations the AGCommons team has encountered throughout the outreach effort. Here is just one example:
Mary, a smallholder farmer in Uganda, is planning her irrigated market crops for the dry season. She needs to know which crops are suitable for her location, the extent of demand from accessible markets, when to sow, and the amounts and types of inputs needed for a successful crop. She will obtain this information through her local extension worker, from paper maps and other location-specific bulletins in her village, and via the radio – or potentially by using a cell phone to directly access AGCommons spatial data.
However, it has also become clear that providing smallholder farmers with location-specific and timely information is enormously challenging at many different levels: technical, cultural, social and economic, to mention only a few.
At the same time, agricultural development organizations and other initiatives often don’t have the specific expertise or sufficient resources to exploit the value and possibilities offered by geospatial data, information, analyses and tools.
Reaching the smallholder farmer indirectly by extending the reach and impact of well established agriculture development programs and intermediary groups in Africa represents an efficient and effective way for AGCommons to ensure the benefits of spatial technology reach smallholder farmers.
AGCommons will position itself as a service provider, to “turbocharge” existing initiatives and engender economies of scale and increased efficiency by providing services through a “commons” approach. The commons approach aims to create the greatest possible good for the largest number of people. For AGCommons this means creating spatial infrastructure and services that enable the open sharing of location specific information. This knowledge-intensive resource requires significant technological expertise that is currently in short supply in Africa, but which will be made available through the partnerships forged by AGCommons. In line with AGCommons’ provision of cost-effective services to clients, the necessary capacity in geospatial technology will be built up locally for the long-term benefit of African farmers.
There have been previous efforts in Africa to promote spatial data and technology sharing but not extensively in the agricultural development domain. Many examples of information technology businesses already exist in Africa (for example,Ushahidi, Geomark Solutions) and there are several international efforts for geospatial information standardization and sharing. But there are no examples of these being brought together in Africa to serve agricultural development. AGCommons will partner with all organizations that have complementary goals, such as SERVIR, to share resources and knowledge.
AGCommons will participate in AfricaGIS 2009 International Conference in Kampala, Uganda, 26-30 October to inform on its development as an Africa-based service bureau.
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