The Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) has given five grants totalling $536,040 to five institutions in Africa and the European Union.

CTA hopes the grant will fillip the adoption, uptake and scaling of information and communication technologies (ICTs) solutions in the agricultural sector.

This is part of the follow-up to the ICT4Ag International Conference organized by CTA and its partners in Rwanda’s capital Kigali in November 2013.

The five winning initiatives will be deployed in Antigua, Belize, Barbuda, Trinidad and Tobago (Caribbean); Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Mali (West Africa); and South Sudan (East Africa) to support agricultural policy processes, agricultural extension and advisory services, fisheries value chain, and market information services.

The winning organizations are:

• eLEAF Competence Centre- based in Netherlands and it uses reliable, quantitative data on water and vegetation coverage to support sustainable water use, increase food production and provide environmental protection systems, will be scaling up its satellite-based information services at the Gezira Irrigation Dam in South Sudan to provide targeted delivery of extension services to farmers.
• RONGEAD- a France-based international network system made up of NGOs, technical specialists, international institutions and businesses that provides market information services, will use the grant to improve its current initiative and scale it up through market analysis, training and capacity building, provision of information and advice and delivery of a business intelligence service to improve the competitiveness, profitability and ability of smallholder farmers to manage business risks in food chains in West Africa.
• Syecomp Business Services – a private-sector provider of geographic information system (GIS) services based in Ghana, will use its grant to develop a proof of concept and explore business models for the adoption of geospatial technology (GIS/global positioning system applications), dissemination of agro climatic information and mFarm actor-chain interactions in Ghana.
• The University of West Indies – a public-sector research institute located in Trinidad and Tobago, will use its grant to extend and scale up an existing suite of web and mobile applications (mFisheries) for small-scale fisheries. It will also explore a novel co-management delivery model for ICTs amongst various agents in the small scale fisheries ecosystem in the Caribbean.
• Yam Pukri – an NGO based in Burkina Faso, will use the grant to improve the monitoring and implementation of agricultural policies using ICTs, thereby empowering smallholder farmers to contribute to the agricultural and rural development policy processes.

The five grants were awarded following a rigorous competitive process that involved more than 30 high-quality proposals addressing various informational issues along agricultural value chains.