Agro: Community informatics provide cost effective delivery in rural areas

NaijaAgroNet:

Community Informatics (CI) provides a basis for approaching cost effective service delivery

in rural areas by focusing on the utilization of development of capacities and skills in local

communities as a means for enhancing and leveraging technical and external human

resources, reports Brenda Zulu.

These according NaijaAgroNet were examples drawn from Columbia, Kenya and Sudan presentations at the on-going ICT4Ag the digital springboard for inclusive agriculture on "Strengthening Grassroots Engagement  in  Agriculture Research and Development (ARD) Policy Processes"  in Kigali.

These NaijaAgroNet Learnt showed that by integrating technical infrastructures with community and social processes, it is possible to link rural areas  to national service delivery systems while developing local capacity and supporting the local social and economic development in rural areas.

Ligia Maria Mejia Diaz, a Researcher at Research Group of Basins, Tolima University in Columbia shared her experience on Participatory GIS (PGIS) a tool contributing to the empowerment and governance of communities for the benefit of sustainable development.

She said that PGIS presented their local population with an increased power and the inclusion of the marginalised through education and participation in geographic technologies. She said PGIS was a tools for marginalized communities whose opinion was usually ignored in the planning process.

Mejia Diaz says there was a need to for training as this was a very important part of PGIS . The project challenges included changing the original design of the project to a new design as the community surprised the researchers by their wealth of indigenous knowledge.

Brenda Zulu:

... Linking agrobiz, people & technology