A Strategic Plan on

Information Management for Improving Food Security in

The Horn of Africa

WAICENT

The aim of this paper is to present a strategic plan on food security information - knowledge management and dissemination using the experience and tools developed by FAO's World Agricultural Information Centre (WAICENT). Over the past two decades there has been an increased attention on the part of donor countries and implementing agencies on the effectiveness of the efforts in reducing food insecurity in the Horn of Africa. National and international agencies alike have realised that information is central to achieving the goal of food security and poverty alleviation in the Horn of Africa.

It is clear that vulnerability to famine in the Horn of Africa is a very complex issue. The fact that the causes and solutions involve interactions among economic, social, institutional, technical issues and the physical environment, means that only a concerted effort among all UN agencies, governments and civil society is essential for an improvement in the long-term food security situation in the region.

It has been only in the last few years that the information management and exchange technologies have been available to support this kind of a co-operative approach for reducing food insecurity. The strategic programme that is being proposed here can only succeed if it incorporate an information management and dissemination component which will insure that the plans and programmes that are launched can really incorporate local knowledge along with the technical know-how that is now available at the click of a mouse.

To address the long-term food security needs of the vulnerable populations in the region the information management component will need to address the needs for a transparent and participatory process in formulating and implementing each project initiative. In this way, the Horn of Africa programme will have an unprecedented chance of succeeding by taking advantage of the most up-to-date information management systems developed by FAO-WAICENT.

A Strategic Approach

The role of information is particularly important in shaping the new practices and methodologies that will be required to insure agricultural development and food security in the region.

The strategic plan outlined below addresses the most important elements that will enable us to harness the potential brought about by development in information management and dissemination.

Elements of the Strategic Plan

1. . Information systems platforms to improve access and exchange

The first element of the strategic plan pertains to the tools and partnerships needed to improve access to agricultural information need to have wide applicability across many disciplines so as to improve access to information in all relevant domains, such as health, education, food security and the environment. Indeed, partnership with other sectors will be essential, as the human capital and connectivity required to support access to information in countries are unevenly available.

WAICENT has recently implemented a Web information management tool, which gives the "data owners", the possibility to catalogue their pages and publications on the Web. At the same time, the meta-information improves the access to users on the different topics and themes, such as gender and food security, desertification, agricultural trade and development, and many others.

Considerations for a Strategic Approach on a Decentralised Information Management Programme

A system-wide strategy on information and knowledge management requires a different approach from the current experience in FAO. The strategy is based on the following requirements:

· Distributed-decentralised systems: the strategy should be based on distributed database systems, where the data would remain under the stuartship of the data-owners, insuring that it is up to date and quality can be maintained.

· Portability – Ability to operate with various databases, web-servers, application servers and operating system environments.

· Scalability – Ability for the same system to operate on CD-ROM, standalone PCs, mid-level servers, or high-end UNIX machines without changing code.

· Flexibility – Ability to run on a web server or in stand alone mode on a CD-ROM and other devices, such as the electronic Book; in either a central, distributed or hybrid environment.

· Adaptability (Future Proofing) – Adherence to major open and non-proprietary standards (XML, Java), in order to position the system to grow with and adapt to technological changes and to be able to slot in third-party products, based on similar standards, where appropriate.

· License and Royalty free – Ability to distribute the networking solution to donors, partners and users with no software licensing or royalty costs.

· Standards Based –Adhere to open and non-proprietary standards for the technical architecture and tools. There is a need to emphasise the use of standards and tools for indexing and searching information resources (e.g. multi-lingual thesaurus such as AGROVOC), which will insure the consistency for managing this wealth of information resources.

Food Security Information Management: Distributed Databases and Information Systems

WAICENT has developed a new approach to accessing information and knowledge for a decentralised network of partners. Most of the issues to be addressed in food security and sustainable development require information from many disciplines, making it necessary to query across many sources of information resources throughout the region and the world.

Recent developments in information management have made possible the establishment of distributed networks of databases and content, which are required for improving access to the wealth of information and knowledge available among each of the national and international partners involved. The new technologies can also improve the effectiveness of searching and retrieving relevant data and information across these distributed information networks.

The Decentralised Web-site Information management system has been developed by WAICENT as a Portal which includes a Knowledge-base Management System. The system is a framework that provides a full set of web-based functionality geared to aid the administration, organisation, indexing, cross-referencing, and uploading and retrieval aspects of information sharing/publishing activities in a decentralised and participatory world-wide network.

The system is being developed in a modular and platform independent architecture that makes it possible to maximise the scalability, portability and flexibility aspects. The system functionality is also modular, based on an architecture that will make it possible to add additional features into the system, and re-use modules such as dynamic mapping and XML based cross-databases search.

Components of the Decentralised Web-based Information Management System

The flexibility, scalability and portability characteristics of the system have been specifically designed to insure that the system an be adapted to the needs of local communities, extension agents, using a variety of media, or in combination with rural radio, Telecnters (developed by ITU), or on CD-ROM and on print.