[Geo4All] AgriGIS ThinkTank Summary and welcoming Center for Agricultural Networking and Information Sharing (CANIS) , Kenya to GeoForAll

Suchith Anand Suchith.Anand at nottingham.ac.uk
Wed Nov 16 04:40:52 PST 2016 

Dear Dhairya,

Welcome to GeoForAll. We look forward to work with you and all colleagues for expanding Data driven agro transformation in Africa.

Best wishes,

Suchith

Dr. Suchith Anand
http://www.geoforall.org/
http://opensourcegeospatial.icaci.org

GeoForAll - Building and expanding Open Geospatial Science

________________________________________
From: Dhairya Ycenter <dhairya at y-center.org>
Sent: 11 November 2016 3:23 PM
To: Kiringai Kamau
Cc: Anand Suchith; discuss at lists.osgeo.org; geoforall at lists.osgeo.org; Prof. S.G. Kiama; Dr. John Mburu; Nampala, Paul; Ann Rose Mwangi; Muchiri Nyaggah
Subject: Re: AgriGIS ThinkTank Summary and welcoming Center for Agricultural Networking and Information Sharing (CANIS) , Kenya to GeoForAll

Hello Suchith,

Greetings from Ycenter in New York,

Thank you for sending these meeting updates.
This is so helpful for our own understanding of Data driven agro transformation in Africa.

Kiringai  - The young people we work with, will have so much more access to right tools. It's very encouraging to see the interest of so many players.

Best,
Dhairya Pujara


Dhairya Pujara<http://y-center.org/dhairyapujara>
Founder CEO Ycenter<http://y-center.org/>
M: +1 (215) 479 1173
Philadelphia, PA, USA
>From Philadelphia to Mozambique: an Indian’s journey to create a socially-impactful program<http://yourstory.com/2015/07/dhairya-pujara/>

On Thu, Nov 10, 2016 at 10:30 PM, Kiringai Kamau <kiringai at gmail.com<mailto:kiringai at gmail.com>> wrote:
Thanks Suchith for this!

We are excited about the possibilities that are slowly emerging from the potential of creating a Geo Spatial Driven Africa. Since our ThinkTank Forum, we are discussing with Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM) and a number of other partners on how we can make data driven decision making the focus of the next step in creating knowledge for the African Food Sector.

RUFORUM is therefore collaborating with CANIS to evolve a truly ICT4Ag driven degree programme that will be adopted by the 80+ members of the forum to also drive the open data on agriculture and nutrition. We have negotiated a proposal with the IDRC to support the financial support to launch this initiative, but are looking for other partners so that this effort can move faster to realization.

Our thinking is that we should have the curriculum formulation going on as we try and evolve the research domains that IDRC is keen in supporting. The financial support to the Think Tank Secretariat is currently being supported by CANIS, VACID Africa and Y-Center Africa. We intend to run a number of other short courses in Design Thinking and Innovation on the use of Open Data for the Transformation of Agriculture  (ODATA) in Africa which we are currently evolving with Y-Center. Details of this will emerge as we evolve the programme. Anyone who knows institutions that we can work with is free to introduce the same to us so that we reach out to them.

The university of Nairobi has taken lead in adopting the Geospatial coordination perspectives of CANIS and is centralizing all its GeoSpatial Operations from a centralized server that has been dedicated to the model behind what came out of the Think Tank deliberations. Ms. Ann Rose Mwangi <arosemwangi at gmail.com<mailto:arosemwangi at gmail.com>> is the linkage person on the coordination of the secretariat.

We look forward to inviting you all in the launch of the ODATA Programme once a date has been granted by the VC of the University of Nairobi on a date to be communicated soon.

We are and shall always remain at your disposal.

Sincerely,

Kiringai Kamau

On Thu, Nov 10, 2016 at 11:50 PM, Suchith Anand <Suchith.Anand at nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:Suchith.Anand at nottingham.ac.uk>> wrote:
Dear All,

We are pleased to send you the summary updates from the very successful AgriGIS Workshop & Think Tank meetings in Nairobi organised jointly by the The University of Nottingham, the Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD), the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) and Crops for the Future (CFF) on October 27-28, 2016.

The objective of the event was to provide a forum for stakeholders in agricultural research organizations in Africa to share knowledge and propose strategies on improving the use of  open data, open educational resources , free and open geospatial software with the aim to expand Capacity Building and Training in AgriGIS to support Global Food Security.

The slides of the event  are at  http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/grace/events/agrigis-kenya-slides.aspx

We thank all the participants for their inputs and contributions for the Think-Tank discussions which covered the following themes (details to the summary of each theme are available at the event website)


  *   Big challenges for Agriculture in the African context
  *   Tools (known & wish list) used for agri using satellite/remote data collection
  *   Existing or potential data sets we would like to use
  *   Practical, technical, policy, impementation obstacles to Location aspects/geotechnologies for agri
  *   Data and Modelling


There was interest and support from  participants for the need for Open Data in Agriculture and  initiatives like GODAN [1].

Some of the key themes that emerged  from the Think Tank discussions were  the following


  *   Importance of the need of an organisation locally to facilitate and ensure sustainability of AgriGIS
  *   Spearheading open data and free and open software use for cost savings, expanding innovation and sustainability
  *   Need for Capacity building among stakeholders

We are getting lot of emails of interest lot of colleagues in Africa expressing interest in follow up activities. We are pleased to inform that Center for Agricultural Networking and Information Sharing (CANIS) , Kenya has volunteered to  host the secretariat for the Think Tank  for developing as a focal point for interaction with other stakeholders on Open GIS and open data and keep building the ideas from the ThinkTank. We thank Kiringai Kamau and colleagues at CANIS for their support.  Please contact Kiringai (email  - kiringai at gmail.com<mailto:kiringai at gmail.com>  ) for expanding AgriGIS momentum in Kenya. We are also pleased to welcome CANIS as our new GeoforAll lab in Kenya.


It is good to see many blogposts from participants of the workshop such as the one at GEOSYMP  http://geosymp.com/2016/10/what-happened-at-the-agrigis-workshop-and-think-tank/


We would like to specifically thank our hosts RCMRD ( Dr Hussein Farah and all colleagues) for their excellent organisation and arrangements including the hands on workshop .  We need to also make use of the community and momentum build by the ThinkTank for expanding future collaborations and make sure the community is kept  updated. Please make use of the  Twitter  created  to share your ideas https://twitter.com/hashtag/agrigisnr2016?f=tweets&vertical=default&src=hash


We  shared some examples of research at Nottingham at http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/genius/documents/egrasp-nairobi.pdf

We are hoping to keep building the collaborations in AgriGIS to  support Global Food Security.

Best wishes,

Suchith

[1] http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/genius/documents/godan-uon-intro.pdf


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Please do not use, copy or disclose the information contained in this
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