CAUSA

2015–2018 | Information exchange system | AfricaRice

Catalyzing the Adoption and Use of Scalable technologies in Africa: A pilot project to increase innovation.

APHLIS infographic

The project

The rate of adopting new and improved technologies in the field of agriculture is low in some areas of Africa. As a result, farms are less resilient to the challenges of climate change, leading to lower production and income.

The main objective of the CAUSA project was to strengthen the innovation process by establishing an operational framework to increase knowledge exchange and collaboration between all actors in the agricultural innovation system: farmers, research and knowledge resources, and service providers.

The project ran in Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, and Togo between 2014 and 2016 and the main focus was on rice production. Technologies included evaluation of new rice varieties, farm machinery and integrated approaches such as SMART-valleys (a low-cost and sustainable approach to develop inland valleys in sub-Saharan Africa for rice production).

What we did

AKM Services was the technical implementing partner in this project, taking care of all IT related aspects of the project:

  • Setup and hosting of the project's communication infrastructure, including wiki, ownCloud instance and user management system
  • Development of the technology database
  • Development of a website (eHub) for the entry and evaluation of agricultural technologies
  • Development of a system to generate the highly structured questionnaires used for this project

Read more about the project on WORLDAGROFORESTRY.ORG ›

AKM Services offers excellent value for money. As Head of Knowledge Management at AfricaRice I especially liked the reliability and honesty. Based on a clear understanding of our needs and capabilities and its excellent technical expertise, AKM Services provided solid solutions that contributed significantly to the successful digital transformation of our business. The resulting ICT environment has made my team and the large number of partners more productive, enabling us to unlock valuable resources for our core activities.