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...

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,...

Francesca Pelloni Life is a balancing act. Finding an equilibrium that works for you, your family and your friends is often difficult to achieve. And no one knows this better than AGCommons Project Officer Francesca Pelloni. After a five-year hiatus of sorts from the hectic world of IT project management,...

At the recent CSI-AGCommons-WhereCampAfrica event in Nairobi we interviewed some of the participants to get their perspectives on why maps are important, on their role in the response to climate change, on their use in recent crises…. Why maps? is a video produced by a Nairobi-based crew to help...

Andy JarvisAn interview with Andy Jarvis, agricultural geographer, CIAT and Bioversity Q: You say you have two “mantras.” What are they? A: One is “crop wild relatives.” (Note: A crop wild relative (CWR) is the wild variety of a domesticated food crop.) When you look at the status of crop wild...

    CJ Terborgh An interview with Carmelle J. Terborgh, Federal/Global Affairs team lead, ESRI at the Africa Geospatial technology for Agriculture week in Nairobi Context: Launched 40 years ago as a consulting and research firm, ESRI created the first commercial geographic information software, ArcInfo....

Whitney Gantt A Quick Win: Community Knowledge Workers in Uganda AGCommons, the newly funded project coordinated by the CGIAR, is about getting the right farm information to the right person in the right place at the right time. To jumpstart the effort, in December 2008 AGCommons challenged...

A conversation with Meshak Nyabenge, GIS Unit Manager, WorldAgroforestry Center (ICRAF) Nairobi at the CSI-AGCommons meeting in Nairobi Q: What sparked your interested in GIS? A: As a kid, I was always imagining I could develop a boundary map of my village. I don’t know why–maybe ‘cause I...

     Srikant Vasan, BMGF An interview with Srikant Vasan, Senior Program Officer for Agricultural Development, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and member of the AGCommons steering committee. Now at the AGCommons meeting in Nairobi Q: What’s the Gates Foundation’s major interest in Geographic...