Last week, African leaders pledged to reprioritise agriculture in their national policies and increase state spending to end hunger across the continent by 2025.
Smallholders need to work the logic of markets. For that they need skills – and they do not come spontaneously. To make farming a business, farmers need specific services to help them in doing so: business services. And these services need to cater to a wide range of types of farmers. Continue reading “Agri entrepreneurs as a new type of innovators”→
Thirty-eight countries have met internationally-established targets in the fight against hunger, chalking up successes ahead of a deadline set for 2015, FAO confirmed on June 12th 2013.
Twenty-four technical online communicators (aka ‘web geeks’), representing 12 of the 15 centres of the CGIAR Consortium and 5 CGIAR partner organizations, along with a dozen or so experts in various technical web-related matters, recently participated in a five-day workshop at Bioversity International, a CGIAR centre based in Maccarese, outside Rome. This was the first such meeting of CGIAR (and partner organization) staff who, just a few years ago, would probably have been called ‘webmasters’, in the sense of technicians who design or maintain websites.
TOCS Group photo
Group picture of the participants, resource experts and facilitator (Peter Casier, middle of back row, both hands raised) of the first CGIAR Technical Online Communicators Workshop, 27–31 May 2013, Rome.
That designation has changed, however, splintering into dozens of specialities in recent years with the on-going explosion of social media and other online tools, vehicles and platforms. So ours was a motley group of people serving variously (and singly or in combinations) as ‘web developers’, ‘web designers’ or ‘web [or server] administrators’; as ‘social media coordinators’ or ‘content managers’; as ‘knowledge sharers’ or ‘workflow coordinators’. Some were more on the IT side, some more focused on user engagement; some were most interested in ensuring security, some in ensuring open access; some started as content designers, some as content writers; some are now specializing in web analytics, some in social learning. Interestingly, fully a third of the group still work mostly on originating online content (content still king?), while others now focus on ‘spinning’ the content through various social media channels (a task becoming a job on its own).
Dealing with epilepsy 
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