The bi-annual AfricaGIS conference took place during the week of October 24th near Kampala, Uganda. AGCommons was one of the primary event sponsors this year and exposure really help get the word out about the value of mapping to small scale farming in Africa.
The team had the opportunity to meet everyone from local government representatives, technology and software vendors as well as local GIS and mapping software developers. There was some wet and wild weather during the week that caused some trouble getting around Kampala and that ultimately forced all the vendors out of the big tent at the conference.
Aside from just letting the African GIS community know about the program the team was able to talk to several people about the potential business opportunity listed on the AGCommons.org site. We we’re also able to connect for several days with the RCMRD leadership team and SERVIR-Africa software engineering team in Nairobi.
The number of projects and speakers represented was amazing. People from the Green Belt Movement, the MAPA projects and folks from the Jane Goodall Institute are all doing amazing things extending the reach of mapping technologies into the local African communities. There was also the usual batch of Spatial Data Infrastructure talks and NSDI development discussion.
The more time I spend in Africa the more I see how a systematic approach for GIS and mapping to serve small-scale agriculture is lacking. Related efforts for climate change, water management, and planning are an invaluable resource for getting the approach to AGCommons just right. But it’s clear that the small-holder farmer population in Africa has been under served with reliable and relevant location based information, a gap that AGCommons intends to fill.
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