agriculture 10 speakers: from ethiopia, ghana, hungary, india, jamaica, jordan, netherlands,...

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WORLD IT FORUM 2007AUGUST 22 - 24, 2007 ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA

Agriculture

10 speakers: From Ethiopia, Ghana, Hungary, India, Jamaica, Jordan, Netherlands, Philippines, and Zambia

Diverse range of experiences; together demonstrating the rapid developments in the field and several concrete applications of ICTs in agriculture, rural development and related areas.

Presentations focused on ‘agricultural’ and ‘developmental’ challenges, showing how ICTs as well as information, knowledge and communication processes make a difference.

Agriculture

ICT’s are being used in rural areas:

To power e-commerce marketplaces for farmer cooperatives (the Philippines, India); connecting buyers and sellers and enabling efficient transactions.

To automate and enable financial transactions of cooperatives, provide local ‘b2b’ centers for farming communities, and provide mobile banking services to individual farmers (Philippines).

Agriculture


To help revolutionize Ethiopian agriculture by providing more efficient marketing systems for agricultural commodities; “From a sack of grain to a sack of money”!

To support the social and economic fabric of rural villages and communities (Hungary); providing services and employment otherwise not available.

Agriculture


To inform planning, land use, and tree planting decisions in Ethiopia. Land suitability is mapped with GIS to guide decisions on investment (where to plant interesting economic plants) and conservation (what is happening to the forest zone where coffee originated).

As part of phytosanitary and farm monitoring and traceability systems to track and certify the quality of agricultural export products; without this, farmers would lose access to foreign markets and perhaps their livelihoods (Jamaica).

Agriculture


To help safeguard agricultural biodiversity by providing access to catalogues and indexes of plant seeds and their characteristics. Such genebanks were used to replenish seed lost in recent Mozambique floods.

Agriculture

ICT’s are being used by the agricultural development community:

To share experiences among development practitioners (India). Community of practice members contributed their insights on agricultural extension to make future investments more effective; discussions on school meals and nutrition led to real collaborative pilot projects.

As a knowledge sharing and exchange tool among people working on IFAD-sponsored projects in the Middle East and North Africa.

Agriculture

ICT’s are being used by the agricultural development community:

To reinforce communication among agricultural information specialists worldwide.

To globally document and exchange innovative uses of information and knowledge and ICTs – e-agriculture

Building the Infrastructure

Main issues discussed

• How to build affordable communication technology and infrastructures in developing countries, isolated and rural areas.

• The role of the local telecommunication companies.

• Private and NGO initiatives against the lack of investments of the local companies.


Main issues discussed (ctd)• The difficulties for managing new

technologies by citizens of D.C. specially in rural areas

• The need of training people to plan, install, maintain and use the communication infrastructure and systems.


Main conclusions• Connecting people should be considered as a

need not a business• Cooperation between local telecommunication

companies and private/NGO initiatives should be encouraged

• Training programs are essential for the use, installation and maintenance of the infrastructure and services.


Main conclusions (ctd)• Monopolistic tendencies should be

broken to benefit the citizens• Public services must play an active role

providing connectivity• Cooperation between countries would

facilitate the task

Economic Opportunities

It focused on:• How can late comers gain from BPO

opportunities• Opportunities to create wealth by using

new collaborative tools• Potential for open source in developing

countries• The state of telecentres and its new

frontiers


Emerging thinking from the sessions:

1. Developing countries may gain more from focussing on emerging models rather than maturing models.

2. They will be better placed in moving up the value curve by embracing emerging collaborative tools sooner than later.


Emerging thinking from the sessions:3. Open source is an important option,

developing countries may choose that as a longer term policy and it should be selected as appropriate.

4. Telecentre models in developing countries show promise and need the support of the strong, affordable and ubiquitous internet infrastructure.

Education

Issues

• access, equity & quality

• gender

• teachers trained in ICT skills and pedagogies

• implementing ICT policies

• capacity building at all levels

Education

Issues

• lifelong learning

• content development

• promoting indigenous languages

• ownership

Education

Approaches

• participatory approaches (wiki, blogs, web 2.0)

• partnership, collaboration and information sharing models

Education

Approaches

• integrating infrastructure & capacity building

• flexible & alternative delivery mecanisms for learning for development

Empowerment & Participation

• Building knowledge societies at all levels will lead to the empowerment and participation of citizens. To achieve this, inclusive ICT policies must be developed, implemented and evaluated;


• In Africa, public private partnerships are already contributing to education and skills enhancement programmes, and ICT industry leaders are open to proactive governments for more collaborations


• Community media centres remain effective in bringing empowerment and participation to marginalized communities through ICTs , but a combination of cost-effective technologies, policies, content diversity and private sector partnerships need to drive scale-up initiatives;


• ICTs should also enhance empowerment and participation of the physically challenged and other disadvantaged groups of society

Environment

We recognize that there may be some perceptions about environmental ICT that “relegate” it to a lesser standing:1. Does it threaten:

a) poverty reduction?b) job creation?

2. Is it only about “tree-hugging”?3. Is it somehow less important than simply ICT

penetration?The answers are 1: No and No, 2: No and 3: No !

Environment

• The environment commission is about monitoring, modelling and predicting risk to life, health, and quality of life when those human rights are threatened by:– flood, storm, seismic and volcanic activity,

unsustainable agricultural practices, unsustainable land use, marginalization of indigenous populations, climate change, and so on

Environment

• It is also about communicating those risks, by means of ICT-supported community involvement, the internet, ad-hoc networks, remote sensing, and exploring innovative uses of the traditional communications channels (such as wide-casting through mobile telephone networks and public media) when the environmental risk is extremely critical

Environment

• Colleagues from Central America, Asia, Europe, and North America carried out a discourse on some of the best practices in good science and in community involvement. We will continue communicating

• We will reinforce the potential collaboration among our active participants this week, on risk analysis relating to land and water use and abuse, and seismic and volcanic activity for starters

Environment

• We proposed to form a special section of IFIP Working Group 5.11 (Computers and Environment), possibly in collaboration with other IFIP WG’s such as WG6.9 (Communication Systems for Developing Countries)

Health

1. Healthcare is very information-intensive and has a very high MDG priority → ICT has potential for high developmental impact in healthcare → governments should put more emphasis on e healthcare in national ICT strategies

Health

2. There is much fragmentation and duplication in national health management information systems → flexible integrated HMIS/HIS are needed, integrating manual and e-technologies and data from multiple data sources

Health

3. ICT is now appropriate for patient-based information management also within health facilities (clinical use in healthcare provision), but there is a need for appropriate patient-based software and existing applications development efforts are fragmented4. In appropriate software development, emphasis should be on Free and Open Source Software, open standards, integration and collaboration → HELINA Collaboration Framework project

Health

5. Local holistic health information systems capacity-building programmes – including training for health professionals, university programmes and practice-oriented research – must be developed and sustainably funded

Social, ethical & legal issues

• Input was obtained for future work by giving the participants an opportunity to indicate what legal, ethical and social problems they face with respect to ICT-development and what issues they wanted addressed by the commission.


• The Commission also set up a network of WITFOR 2007 participants who want to join the knowledge exchange of our commission, so as to keep the work in Africa going (e.g. discussion list, possible future workshops in Africa, etc.) and have participants of WITFOR 2007 involved in the upcoming WITFOR activities. For this the participants listed their names and the topics / problems / challenges they are interested in.


• All the sessions were well attended and the speakers gave comprehensive and thought-provoking talks. All sessions concluded with meaningful and lively discussions.


Further work will be done the following projects:1. A project in Ethiopia on developing e-learning modules

for the legal domain (human rights, intellectual property as first themes). In doing this, benefit from lessons learned with similar projects in developing countries among them, a project with Siberia.

2. A project on identity theft regulation in South Africa. This is very important for states intending to maximise both e-commerce and e-government as full participation in these initiatives exposes personal information to exploitation by criminals.


3. The online portal on the MDGs will be enhanced and implemented.

4. The discussion on standards will continue with an emphasis on networking and collaboration between various states

New work will begin on the issues raised by the participants such as ICTs and Human Rights, the cultural impact of ICTs and the formulation of codes of ethics for ICT professionals.

agriculture 10 speakers: from ethiopia, ghana, hungary, india, jamaica, jordan, netherlands,...

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