One first step to supporting farmers is to understand their information needs. Farm Radio International aims to strengthen small-scale farming and rural communities, and a key step in doing so is to know the communities better. This is where formative research comes in. We collaborate and learn about the community in order to understand its … More Meeting Our Audience
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are being used across the world to generate efficiency gains for farmers. This has led to an information and data explosion with an associated boom in new applications, tools, actors, business models, and entire industries. Agri-food systems are being transformed. Beyond the technological developments, data for and from farmers has … More Digital and data-driven agriculture opportunities for smallholders focus of new white paper from GFAR, GODAN and CTA
Issues around farmers’ rights to data, both in terms of access to data and ownership of data, are crucial to one of the key areas of activity of partners in GFAR: the opening of access to information systems for sharing, transforming and using agricultural knowledge, especially in light of GFAR’s overall approach to putting the smallholder … More Highlights of the international symposium on farmers’ access to data and full video recording
As part of our work on farmers’ rights to data and following up on the face-to-face course on Farmers’ Access to Data organized in Centurion in November 2017, GFAR organized 6 webinars to make the content of the course available to everybody. The webinars were co-convened with GODAN and CTA and were conducted by some … More Closing the webinar series on Farmers’ access to data
The rural workforce in Brazil is getting younger, according to recent research. Meet the Gen-Y agripreneurs changing the face of farming in Brazil. By Raphael Marques da Silva, on behalf of HarvestPlus. The economic crisis in Brazil has chosen millennials–the most apt generation for building the future of the country–as its main victim. According to a … More Will Brazilian Millennials Look to a Future in the Fields?
Dan Berne and Valeria Pesce In the week of 20-24 November 2017, GFAR convened a course and symposium on Farmers’ access to data in Centurion, South Africa. This event is an example of the activities that GFAR wants to promote towards ensuring that communities determine their own needs and their own future, which is one … More Learning about data for farmers and how it can help to “cross the donga”
Because we, the Partners in GFAR, care about the future of our youth and the future of agriculture, education is one of our most important agendas. Many young people in Sub-Saharan Africa leave school without being able to properly read and write, with their work prospects handicapped for life. An enormous number of young people … More Because we care: How Partners in GFAR are transforming agricultural learning
TAP and GFAR are pleased to invite you to the webinar: Sharing Knowledge on Capacity Development for Agricultural Innovation through TAPipedia Date: 7 November 2017 Time: 11:30 AM Rome time (GMT +1) Duration: 1.5 hours REGISTER HERE The Tropical Agriculture Platform (TAP), hosted by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in collaboration … More GFAR/TAP Webinar – Sharing Knowledge on Capacity Development for Agricultural Innovation through TAPipedia
The power of data over our lives is hard to overestimate. It governs how we understand and interact with the modern world, how it is measured and controlled. So what is being done to utilise open data for global food security and nutrition? A side event at CFS44 went a long way to answering this … More Data democracy: a new age
A young man from rural Africa is sitting among the powerful policy makers, experts from various stakeholder agencies, such as civil society, private sector, governmental agencies and United Nations agencies in Rome at the Committee on World Food Security session 44 (CFS44). He is holding a pamphlet in his hand, on it written in bold … More Puzzling Agripreneurship
For 500 years, nothing changed. Our job as communicators was simple: from the first mass-produced printed publication -The Gutenberg Bible- in 1454 up to the 1990’s, “communications” was limited to “paper only”. Came the internet in the 1990’s, and we moved more “online”. Came social media in the early 2000’s, and our tool set expanded … More Join the GFAR webinar on “Webcasting & Webstreaming”
What better way to show the commitment of a group of individuals to a cause than to tell their story with their own pictures and words? Let’s start at the beginning… “On a sunny Tuesday morning in June, we (members of the GFAR Steering Committee) gathered on an agricultural cooperative on the outskirts of Rome. … More Designing the Future of GFAR: Common Values and Commitment Required
Confusion of goals and perfection of means, seems, in my opinion, to characterize our age. Albert Einstein Will you forgive me, if I step onto my preaching soapbox for a moment? But this is a topic very dear to my heart. People often ask me for the latest trends in communications, where they refer to … More Communications in agriculture, as a means. Not a goal.
GFAR is pleased to invite you to the webinar: Beyond decision making: Foresight as a process for improving attitudes towards change Date: 27 June 2017 Time: 14:00 Rome time Duration: 2 hours max Registration open As part of its series of webinars, GFAR Secretariat is bringing together foresight practitioners and others interested in foresight for … More GFAR Webinar: Beyond decision making: Foresight as a process for improving attitude towards change
We had been driving around for days interviewing farmers in the remote and arid northern part of Burkina Faso. To get from one settlement to the next, it took hours: Hours of negotiating gullies cut deep into the sandy soil, with boulders washed onto what used to be a dirt road. The whole time, the … More Join GFAR’s webinar on “Farm Radio, Community Radio and Participatory Radio”
Hiwot Tirfneh regrets that she wasted water. She lives and farms in the Tigray Region of Ethiopia, where drought is frequent and water is precious. She has never deliberately wasted water, but she only recently learned to harvest rain water to irrigate her crops. This knowledge—gained from a farmer program broadcast by Dimtsi Weyane Tigray—helped … More Radio for resilience in Ethiopia
A new multimillion-dollar initiative plans to disrupt food production across the developing world, with the aim of making it more productive, efficient and resilient – all through the power of information. The CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture is jointly led by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and the International Food Policy … More The disruption starts now: new big data program promises to shake up agriculture
Ajit Maru, GFAR’s Senior Officer, reports on his participation in an interesting workshop in India where GFAR’s and APAARI’s primary objective of transforming agricultural research and innovation systems was illustrated in practice by SDAU, a GFAR and APAARI partner! How to double real incomes of smallholder family farmers and marginal farmers who have less than … More Doubling Farmer Incomes in Five Years
Once upon a time, I was the youngest at any work-related event. Now, it seems, most of the time, I am always the oldest in the room. 🙂 I spent last week with a hundred people less than half my age. And they inspired me. I just came back from ICYA2017, the International Conference for … More I feel inspired!
Youth really are the future of agriculture. GFAR is committed to youth through many projects we do. One of them is YAP, our Youth Agripreneurs Project, where we encouraged young agricultural entrepreneurs to submit their projects (early last year). Through “YAP”, our purpose was not only to find some genuine innovative projects we could sponsor, … More Josine’s journey, as a young agri-preneur
