West African smallholder farmers are witnessing unpredictable changes in their land. Some are noticing that their soil is not as fertile as it used to be, and in some places, where there was once soil, there are now barren patches – useless for planting anything but uncertainty and fear for their...

At the beginning of this year, three different banana diseases were attacking East Africa, devastating farms around the region and exacerbating the prevailing food crisis. To help prevent the spread of such diseases, it is vital that smallholder farmers have access to comprehensive information about...

Throughout most of the developing world, there is a real and urgent need for roads data.  Road location and attribute information can play a vital role in long term development applications and also help humanitarian agencies with short term emergency and logistical planning. Despite this dire need,...

Background Agriculture is intimately tied to its location in the landscape and, by extension, to key conditions strongly influenced by location, particularly climate, soil and water availability. This link to geospatial factors is probably stronger for agriculture than any other economic sector. Geospatial...

“Melinda and I believe that helping the poorest smallholder farmers grow more and get it to market is the world’s single most powerful lever for reducing hunger and poverty.” – Bill Gates. One of the five AGCommons’ Quick Win Projects, Community Level Crop Disease Surveillance,...

AGCommons, the program led by the ICT-KM Program to provide location-specific (geospatial) information to smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa with the goal of improving productivity and livelihoods, will be present at the Africa GIS Conference 2009 in Kampala, Uganda (25-30 October), to inform...

Andy Jarvis is not a new face on our blog or with our program. Andy is a young scientist who leads the CIAT’s Decision and Policy Analysis (DAPA) program, he is an active member of the CGIAR-Consortium for Spatial Information (CSI) and a self-professed “promiscuos geographer” Not...

Wondering how high resolution imagery can help smallholder farmers? The SIBWA – Seeing is Believing West Africa, one of the AGCommons quick win projects, blog series can help you find the answer. VHRIex2: Mindsets & Skillsets to entrust smallholders with Very High Resolution Imagery- A manifesto...

Chances are, you’ve used maps not only to find place or location, but also to explore an area based on a theme or criteria. For example, “I want to eat Korean food in Rome”. Where to eat Korean food in Rome is the geographic extent to a set of criteria to find what I want for planning my...