eLearning Africa: Could ICTs be the Key to Ending Hunger in Africa?

Education and technology can play an important role in ending hunger and malnutrition in Africa once and for all. That is the view of leading experts in communications technology and food security, who will be attending a special session on malnutrition at this year’s eLearning Africa conference (eLA) in Kigali, Rwanda from 26 – 28 September.

Current estimates show that around 14.5 per cent of people living in Africa’s poorest regions are hungry or malnourished. The most obvious victims are often children and, according to the World Health Organisation, hunger and malnutrition are still the biggest causes of child mortality in developing countries. However, that could all be about to change.

Speakers from Ghana, Rwanda and Zambia will show how imaginative initiatives in the education sector in several African countries are already helping to combat malnutrition. They are convinced that ICTs, which are increasingly being used to improve African agricultural output, together with a new focus on providing the right people with the necessary skills, could be the key to ending hunger permanently.

One of the speakers at the eLA session will be Kofi Barimah of Ghana Technology University College (GTUC), who will explain how GTUC has used eLearning to enhance its nutrition programme. He points out that malnutrition is still a serious problem in parts of Ghana. “’Kwashiorkor’, which has found its way into the English dictionary, was derived from ‘Ga’, a native Ghanaian language,” he says. “‘Kwashiorkor’ is a term reserved for severely malnourished children and infants resulting from a deficiency in dietary protein. The mere fact that the English name for a malnourished child comes from a Ghanaian language may help elucidate the seriousness of this problem in Ghana and Africa as a whole.”

With the aid of a small grant from the Catholic University College of Ghana and in partnership with the University of Southampton and the International Malnutrition Task Force, GTUC has integrated an online course on “caring for infants and children with malnutrition” into its degree programme on Public Health.

The eLearning course, which has successfully integrated new learning and teaching materials, gives students and faculty members access to best practices for maternal and child nutrition, using both CDs and online learning. “The project has been very much successful, with students applauding the IMTF and the UoS for such a wonderful intervention,” says Barimah.

“The team has been able to roll out the integration of the first batch of students with promising results. Over one thousand students have been trained during the first year of the introduction of the modules and others are yet to benefit.” Mudukula Mukubi of the Ndola Nutrition Organisation in Zambia will present evidence of the positive effects of ICTs on the delivery of key skills to households headed by women or children.

The research is part of a project, funded by SPIDER, on self-help programmes for the households. “The project seeks to address the lack of entrepreneur and livelihood skills faced by poverty-stricken women and child-headed households in the rural parts of Luanshya, Masaiti and Ndola districts of Zambia,” he explains.

“The project provides skills training in poultry and soybean production... using ICT tools, including smart phones to access and exchange information on social media.”

Rwanda’s experience in implementing a World Health Organisation (WHO) programme on the Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (ICMI) will be the focus of a presentation by Jean de Dieu Gatete of the Maternal and Child Survival Programme (MCSP).

The programme, which is part of the WHO’s strategy to reduce mortality and morbidity in children by improving the management of common illnesses, was adopted by Rwanda in 2006 and is currently practised in public health centres across the country.

However, in spite of national clinical guidelines for the treatment of all children under the age of 5, only 65 per cent receive the recommended care. Fewer than 40 per cent of practitioners in Rwandan health centres have received ICMI training.

The MCSP programme, which has surveyed 148 Rwandan health centres in 12 districts, has been exploring options for introducing alternative, sustainable and low-cost approaches for the delivery of ICMI training to a larger number of providers.

“The project established that computer-assisted learning provided a real opportunity for training health care professionals at low cost (around $178 per participant) compared to the standard classroom based training ($472 per participant),” says Gatete. With the aid of online learning as part of the MCSP programme, over 600 health care providers in 148 health centres have now already been successfully given on-the-job ICMI training.

“The completion of this computer-aided training programme (has) helped to increase the rate of ICMI trained providers from 40 per cent to 79 per cent in 6 months.”

Rebecca Stromeyer, the founder and organiser of eLearning Africa, said: “The full programme for this year’s conference is now online and I am very pleased that it includes an in-depth focus on how ICTs can help to tackle the persistent problem of malnutrition in Africa. It is shocking that, in the twenty-first century, so many people still go hungry.

I am sure, however, that ICTs can make a major contribution to solving the problem and to ensuring that children and mothers get the care they need.” The eLearning Africa conference is accompanied by an exhibition of new products, services and solutions. It also hosts the annual eLearning Africa Ministerial Round Table, at which education and ICT ministers discuss the latest developments in education and technology.

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Big Data Key to Unlocking Innovation in Agriculture for Future Food Security

Keynote address at the Global Forum for Innovations in Agriculture by André Laperrière, Executive Director, of the Global Open Data Initiative for Agriculture and Nutrition, GODAN and Pekka Pesonen, Secretary General, Copa - Cogeca

20th June 2018, Utrecht, Netherlands - The need for advancement of data driven agriculture that will lead the future of innovations in Agriculture has set the agenda at the opening ceremony of the Global Forum for Innovations in Agriculture (GFIA) in Utrecht, Netherlands from 20th  to 21st June 2018, as partner of the first International Week for Smart Food Production (IWSFP). Keynote addresses by An-dré Laperrière, Executive Director, of the Global Open Data Initiative for Agriculture and Nutrition, GODAN addressed the need for data driven agriculture to set the road to innovation in agriculture and was echoed by Pekka Pesonen, Secretary General, Copa - Cogeca - the united voice of farmers and their cooperatives in the European Union who echoed the need for Big Data to support the ambitious objectives of European Farmers.

GFIA Europe the two-day exhibition and conference as part of IWSFP brings together the food and agriculture industries on a global scale for the first time to debate the biggest challenges to drive sus-tainable agriculture for increased productivity and food security in Europe and the World and marks a significant step towards addressing food security and cultivating change to sustainably feed nine bil-lion people by 2050.

Pekka Pesonen in his opening address said: “The agricultural industry has seen substantial changes over the past century. It has moved forwards to an era with digitally enhanced agriculture, precision farming, automated vehicles, robots, drones, biotechnology. Yet this is no longer the stuff of the fu-ture, but actually reality for many farms and cooperatives. The use of modern machinery, equipped with GPS, supported by EU systems such as Galileo and Copernicus and big data can help farmers to achieve ambitions objectives. We support our European businesses to develop new, innovative solu-tions for farming, in particular taking into account our European conditions. Survival of European ag-riculture requires superior knowledge and use of the latest innovative technologies, in line with con-sumer market expectations. It’s therefore of European farmers interest that Europe remains a global leader in research and innovation in order to ensure farmers reap the benefits of new technologies and solutions adapted to our farmer’s needs.”

André Laperrière remarked: “Innovation is key to help the world meet the security challenges that lie ahead of this planet, with 50% more of us to sustain before the 2050 timeframe. Knowledge or data is the key to innovation and the way to make things differently, better, cheaper and more efficient, more sustainable. Innovation is key to progress; innovation in agriculture and nutrition, is the necessary path to the world’s survival. Innovation should not be for the happy few, but for all those involved in the food ecosystem, including farmers big and small from every part of the world.”

He added that: “Innovation can be in may forms a technique that exits somewhere else and can be an innovation once it is brought in; a tool or practice that was once used, and then forgotten; a combina-tion of existing tools or a modification of something so that it acquires new properties; all of these point to data driven agriculture. Agriculture through facts, knowledge, empowerment. Let’s tap into the world’s capacity to innovate.”

In a first for GFIA, the opening ceremony was concluded with a keynote speech by Bas Lansorp, CEO and Co-founder of Mars One, the Dutch foundation that aims to land the first humans on Mars in 2030. He shared the business model for a manned mission to Mars and the complexities of finding a crew that can do it and the need to establish a closed sustainable agricultural ecosystem. Bas stated: “Mars One's mission is feasible because it is a mission of permanent settlement, there is no return trip. It will be extremely important to produce food locally both for the business case and for the wellbeing of the Mars settlers. We have been undertaking numerous successful agricultural projects driven by innovations to replicate the growing conditions on Mars.”

Nicola Davison GFIA Conference Director in her closing remarks and officially opening of the event said: “GFIA has emerged as a global authority on sustainable food production, driving innovation through exhibitions and conferences across the World and we have no doubt that the next two-days will foster meaningful dialogue, collaboration, recognition and year-round action between regional food producers, buyers, innovators, policy makers and investors. This year we are pleased to welcome international delegations from Australia, UAE and countries from the North African Business Council including Mali, Niga, Baku Fasa to GFIA and the Netherlands.”

GFIA Europe runs until the 21st June 2018 alongside a series of other pioneering agricultural events including VIV Europe 2018, European Halal Expo and the Proagrica Future Farming Theatre.

ABOUT GFIA Europe

Cultivating Change. Born with the belief that continuous innovation in agriculture is the only way to sustainably feed nine billion people by 2050, the Global Forum for Innovations in Agriculture has emerged as a global authority on sustainable food produc-tion, driving innovation through exhibitions and conferences across the world. Since 2014, GFIA events have wel-comed over 25,000 visitors and worked with over 50 globally significant partners committed to using the Forum as a catalyst for change.