N2Africa at the annual meeting of the CGIAR Consortium for Spatial Information

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At the end of September I attended the annual meeting of the CGIAR Consortium for Spatial Information (CSI). The meeting was supposed to be part of the African Agricultural GIS Week in Accra, Ghana but was relocated to ITC in Enschede due to Ebola fears.

The meeting provided an opportunity to show some of the spatial analysis work that we are conducting in N2Africa. I presented this short presentation highlighting the use of spatial information for site selection, both at the country level for target sites as well as at the local level for the location of diagnostic and demo/adaptation trials.

There was very little time for questions but there was some interest in the model used to predict yield response to inputs, especially the independent variables used in the model. There was also interest in the market access layers used in the adoption domains and the difference between adoption domains and existing domains such as ASARECA development domains.

As a result of conversations with participants, N2Africa was invited to produce some key maps showing the adoption domains which will appear in the e-Atlas of African Agriculture Research & Development http://agatlas.org/. Additionally there was an invitation for N2Africa to feature in ESRI’s Geoplatform for global development.

All of the presentations of CG Centre and partners are online and can be seen here.

Of particular relevance for N2Africa were the existing IATI ontologies, vocabularies, standards and protocols for geolocation in partner mapping. Also pertinent were the implications of OpenData and OpenAccess which is being implemented in the CGIAR, and ICT for surveys such as the sms surveys (e.g. GeoPoll), which might be considered for narrow questions in N2Africa.

Andrew Farrow, GeAgrofía

From top-bottom: N2Africa, IITA, ASARECA and IFPRI presentations