The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) and the e-Agriculture Community of Practice (COP) are launching a call for good and promising practices on the use of ICTs for Agriculture.

The call aims at collecting lessons learned and recommendations of ICT for agriculture initiatives around the world and sharing them among the members and followers of the e-Agriculture Community of Practice and beyond. The good or promising practice should be about the use of ICTs for agriculture, livestock, fisheries or forestry or rural development in general. The proposed ICT for agriculture practices should be useful and accessible for smallholder farmers.

The selected good and promising practices will be disseminated on the e-Agriculture platform and social media and will be part of an online FAO publication “Good Practices on the use of ICTs for Agriculture”.

Experience Capitalization and Good or Promising practices

• Experience capitalization, or “systematization” is an iterative process through which an experience (with its successes and failures) is identified, valued and documented in various media. This systematic process will allow learning of lessons and identification of good practices. Thanks to this approach, the practice can change and improve and may thereafter be adopted by others. (FAO, 2013)
• A good practice is not only a practice that is good, but also one that has been proven to work well and produce good results in different settings or contexts, and is therefore recommended as a model. It is a successful experience that has been tested and validated, in the broad sense, has been repeated and deserves to be shared, so that a greater number of people can adopt it. (FAO, 2016)
• A promising practice has demonstrated a high degree of success in its single setting, and the possibility of replication in the same setting is guaranteed. It has generated some quantitative data showing positive outcomes over a period of time. A promising practice has the potential to become a good practice, but it has not been thoroughly analysed nor has it been replicated sufficiently to support wider adoption or upscaling. As such, a promising practice incorporates a process of continuous learning and improvement. (FAO, 2016)

For more information on experience capitalization and good practices the participants can refer to the following e-learning course and documents:

• Experience Capitalization for Continuous Learning – e-Learning course
• Concept note: Good practices at FAO: Experience capitalization for continuous learning
• Ongoing project on ‘Capitalization of Experiences for Greater Impact in Rural Development’ which supports practical application of Experience Capitalization

Deadline for submission of good and promising practices: 1st July 2017

For more information, visit the e-agriculture website directly.