Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Objective
• Demonstrate the value of VHRI to
help scale up a few quick-win
productivity enhancement
technologies in 6 smallholder
communities across Burkina Faso,
Ghana, Mali and Niger
• Minuses:
– 1-year timeframe more reasonable than 6-months
– 70K budget a limitation (field work logistics in widely distant locations)
– Scarcity of qualified students (for laboratory and field activities), limited availability
of experienced scientists for backstopping of field work
– more work is needed to evolve knowledge from VHRI-triggered information
exchange (from a science perspective: need of socio-economic backstopping), OR
MAYBE NOT (just dump the whole raw information without further delay)
Next steps and recommendations
• Now what?
– Complete knowledge extraction from onFarm data
– Serve data online on AGCommons.org – including picture and video data
• Next?
– Continue to stimulate demand from locally elected officials through showcasing, with support
from AMEDD (Mali) – Banamba, Diema districts, National Assembly.
– Work out with AGCommons a communication strategy at a regional level
– Develop a larger R4D proposal to scale up approach to 12 other sites in West Africa. Identify
partners and questions in East Africa (SIBEA).
– Explore VHRI dissemination options with and without support. With suggested productivity
enhancement technologies, and without.
– Translate VHRI into national languages – interactive maps
– Delegate processing tasks. Explore crowdsourcing options:
• VHRIbox: online student crowdsourcing with open-source software (e.g. GoogleMaps)
• VHRIex2, ROLLout, FEEDfwd: through local NGO networks (to be identified)
• onFarm: offline crowdsourcing with student interns (e.g. APEJ in Mali – need to engage
political actors), embed VHRI in other participatory research
• inSilico: “re-discover” locally adapted technologies with VHRI