Wold Food Day - October 16th

World Food Day Highlights Importance of Resilience in Agriculture Development 

This year’s World Food Day on October 16 is a reminder that building resilience to climate change and other shocks and stresses is critical to achieving food security. Increasing food production alone is not enough to combat poverty and hunger among the world’s most vulnerable communities. Roughly 1.2 billion people worldwide live in extreme poverty, with 78 percent of them living in rural areas where agriculture is the main driving force of the economy. Programs to better manage drought cycles, revolutionize farming in traditionally unproductive zones, connect farmers to early warning data, and promote access to financial services can truly transform livelihoods and break the cycle of chronic food insecurity.

Several of the winning Global Resilience Challenge teams are demonstrating how these approaches can build resilience among some of the world’s vulnerable populations: CLICK TO READ MORE.

Abstract presentation at KDU-IRC 2015 in Colombo

I was glad to present an abstract on our partnership development project in the 8th International Research Conference at the General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University, Colombo, Sri Lanka on 28^th August 2015.
I was the first presenter on the second day of the conference under the "Computing in Governance" session. Participants were interested on the Frontlinesms and FreedomFone FOSS and the "rapid prototyping, campaign concept".

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Agriculture based MOOCs in India

agMOOCs in India intent to design and deliver MOOCs on topics that are critical to the continued enrichment of knowledge and skills of professionals in agriculture sector.

A training Workshop on Interactive Voice Response for Department of Export Agriculture

Another Freedom fone (FF) workshop was conducted to train the Department of Export Agriculture (DOEA) staff in Kurunegala branch on 28 Jan 2015 at Wayamba University of Sri Lanka. 

DOEA previously introduced FrontlineSMS text messaging technology as part of our communication campaigns. They were actively using the SMS technology to interact with their farmer groups especially sending common message to farmers. DOEA experienced a low texting response rate by the farmers, partly because farmers are reluctant to use texting in part due to language barriers.  However, most interesting thing was after receiving a SMS from DOEA, farmers usually call back to confirm the message and/or ask more information about that. So, DOEA has taken up this insight and wants to test an IVR solution.

They were familiarized with implementing Freedom Fone--a low cost Interactive Voice Response solution (IVR)--for their farmer extension program.  DOEA staff is now well trained to use FF. We put less emphasis on technical background of the FF because they have not previous exposure to the Linux environment. 

They quickly realized the cost benefits and incremental effectiveness they gain from this IVR system and are pleased to use it for farmer extension program.  During the workshop they created a sample voice menu and tested. They need to further discuss the voice menu and content structure design with their administrative personnel (especially with Janaka) at DOEA as they roll out their implementation. 

IVR workshop for DOEA satff

Interactive Voice Response for Radio Programs, a training workshop

A workshop was conducted to train the Rangiri media network staff on 02 Jan 2015. They were familiarizing with implementing the low cost IVR (Interactive Voice Response) solution for their Radio & TV programs. The Freedom fone (FF)  free and open source telephony platform was used in this workshop.

Kasun Perera, a Software developer at Lanka Software Foundation, was the key resource person who conducted the training sessions at the workshop. He has quite familiar with the FF technology and has used the technology in other research work: use of IVR in crisis response and management. . We presented with an overview of the FF technology and then lead the participants through a hands experience with: installing the Freedomfone, setting up the USB dongle, creating voice menu and set up voice call functionally and SMS functionality separately.

Most interesting aspect was the ability to use USB dongles, for voice and SMS connectivity, with newest FF version 2.S.7. The use of dongles further reduces the cost compared with the relatively expensive Mobigator or OfficeRoute GSM modem. Moreover, FF could connect multiple USB dongles with different SIMs simultaneously with  same voice menus and implementation.

Rangiri staff realized the cost benefits and incremental effectiveness they gain from this IVR system and are thrilled to use it firstly with their Radio programming before expanding on to TV. Now that they are trained and are competent with using FF, they will discuss the voice menu and content structure design with their radio programming personnel at Rangiri to roll out their first implementation.

We had previously introduced the FrontlineSMS text messaging technology to Rangiri. They were profoundly using the SMS technology to interact with their listener base. FF also has SMS messaging capabilities with polling function that allows for conducting surveys and simply receiving general text messages. However, it is relatively weaker, compared with FrontlineSMS, as it does not carry the "key word" functionality. Since FF has both voice call and SMS functionality, Rangiri would prefer using the same setup for their SMS & Voice based communication needs. However, we were technically challenged with applying the same key word and filtering with FF received SMS, unlike in FrontLineSMS.

 IVR Workshop @ Rangiri 

Gordon's Talk at the University of Alberta

Stewarding Technology for Inclusive Innovation

LIRNEasia Colloquium: discussing the preliminary results from the ICT campaigns

Inclusive Innovation for Knowledge Mobilization in Agriculture Communities of Practice: preliminary results from the ICT campaigns

LIRNEasia Colloquium

Friday 03rd October 2014

3:30 - 5:00 PM (UTC+5:30)

SPEAKERS:: Mr. Chandana Jayathilake (PhD Candidate, Wayamba University of Sri Lanka) and

Dr. Gordon Gow (Associate Professor, University of Alberta, Canada)

PLACE:     LIRNEasia Office, 12 Balcombe Place, Colombo 08, 

                                                                       Sri Lanka

SKYPE: la_colloquiums

email ranmalee [at] lineasia [dot] to connect

A series of field pilot studies termed as “campaigns”, involving agriculture communities, were conducted in the Kurunegala, Matale, and Batticaloa Districts in Sri Lanka. Farmers identified various knowledge mobilization activities, ranging from exchanging local crop price information, to alerting on elephant attack, to disease control, general inquiries, announcements, so on and so forth. This presentation will discuss the insights gained as well as challenges faced by the research team in carrying out the campaigns, with a view to developing a better understanding of key factors of partnership development for promoting inclusive innovation among these communities of practice.

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Surveys with Farmer Communities in Batticaloa

Greetings Batticaloa lagoon and fort - a pleasant sight each morning while crossing the Kallady bridge, Batticaloa town. From May 1st, the SSHRC Sri Lankan Research Team spent 3 days in the Batticaloa District. We had to balance our work under the heat and humidity and the afternoon heavy thunder showers.

The core team comprised myself from LIRNEasia and Chandana (WUSL/LIRNEasia), Chandana was leading a team of students affiliated with the Wayamba University of Sri Lanka ICT Centre that combined with a team of local community members affiliated with Janathakshan. The Janathakshan members were facilitating and interpreting between the enumerators and the farmers. The teams surveyed the Verugal and Kathirveilli villages in Batticaloa District (neighbouring the Trincomalee District boarder). Both villages were quite devastated  by the ethnic conflict that ended in 2009.

The survey is designed to collect a baseline understanding of the farmer house use of ICTs. The survey was an adoption of LIRNEasia's 2012 Telliuse at BOP survey. The project introduced Tablet PCs and the FuidSurvey application for digitzing the data. However, poor Cellular Internet connectivity was effecting the data collection efficiencies. Web pages were slow in refreshing. Therefore, the enumerators decided to use paper and digitize later.

Answers from the farmers to the 50+ administered questions would provide insights as to how farmers may use mobile phones in their farming practices. The survey results are also a measure to understand the potential take up of technology by those communities after the short campaigns.

Janathakshana, in a previous project, has registered 300 Kathirveilli farmer households. The stratification was simply kathirveilli farmers; thus, giving us a random sample size of 75 households. Over two sessions, morning and afternoon, the team captured over 50 responses.Kathirveilli is a new village that was developed to rellocate beach resident fisher folk in land, following the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami destruction. Now they are taking up agriculture. Interestingly, in Kathirveilli we found several households to not own any kind of telephone. They would use the neighbours or their relatives' at the time of need. The farmers were no more than 1 KM from the main road, 2 KM from the nearest market, and 30 KM from the nearest town of Valachenni.

Comparatively, Verugal farmers who travelled to their plots across the Verugal river, all had a phones. Moreover, they were quite comfortable with using the phone.Janathakshan has registered 100 farmers in that community. There were 22 surveys recorded for that campaign community.

A common trait between the two villages were that each household had their own home gardens and, additionally, the Government had allocated plots on a long term lease. Non-governmental Organizations, such as janathakshan, are supplying resources to build farming infrastructure. Each family earns less than Rs. 100,000 per year. They sell more than 50% of their harvest from the leased and owned lands. 

Vacancy - Research Assistant - MSc/MPhil Agriculture

We are currently looking to fill the role of Research Assistant with a self-motivated, quality conscious individual with strong analytical and organizational skills. The candidate must already be enrolled or choose to enroll in a Master of Science (Msc) or Master of Philosophy (MPhil) program in Agriculture or a related program at a Sri Lankan Institute. Background knowledge and experience with one or more of the following related topics is required: agriculture economics, sustainable agriculture, agricultural extension, and rural sociology.

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