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Moderated conference on rural advisory services for family farms: 1-18 December 2014

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Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 16:17:31 +0100
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I am Ayanda Saki from South Africa with extensive experience in assisting blue chip companies, government departments and other organisations leverage information and communication technology (ICT). l am currently a Masters student at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom, looking at how business intelligence (and other ICTs) can be used to enhance food and nutrition security. It is a case study in family farms considering that 500 family farms produce over 80% of the world's food.
 
Some broad comments
 
I have been most privileged to join this session even though I did not have enough opportunities to participate because I now realise that business intelligence as an ICT concept can support this program from inception. I would love to share a lot more information but I do not have much time but the approach proposed in message 85 (by Deogratias Lwezaura) and 82 (Gabriel Adukpo) as an initial approach. But I also believe that FAO representatives at different locations needs to set up a business intelligence system immediately as this will facilitate an organised and systematic way to manage, store and analyse data. At a simple level, this can start with a data mart that captures advisory transactions, information about where the farmer is, time of transactions, farmers and advisors. This can be used already to trend types of queries per region and, over time, may lead to insights on how the service can be categorised or segmented in the short or long terms. Themes per region may also start to emerge per region.
 
The benefit of this is twofold. It will allow a central repository for all advisory transactions, allow transparency of information to all members participating and will facilitate collaboration, information sharing etc. Over and above this, business intelligence allows for lifecycle management of issues from beginning to end, ensures ease of reporting and analysis on the advisory services themselves and on various aspects of family farmers for different stakeholders. This ultimately allows for a multilevel and multidimensional approach to management of issues across the food supply value chain. 
 
I wish I had more time to share more. Thanks for the opportunity.
 
Miss Ayanda Z Saki
Masters of Research Business and Management
University of Liverpool
Liverpool, 
United Kingdom
Mobile: + 44 79 475 72639
Email: ayanda.saki (at) liverpool.ac.uk

[According to the McGill University business intelligence glossary, the term 'business intelligence' is defined as the "Environment that provides methodologies facilitating in-depth analysis of detailed business data. It includes technology (database and software applications) as well as analysis practices. Business intelligence allows users to receive information that is reliable, consistent, timely, understandable, and easily manipulated" (http://kb.mcgill.ca/?portalid=2&articleid=1464#tab:homeTab:crumb:7:artId:1464  ...Moderator].

[To contribute to this conference, send your message to [log in to unmask] The last day for sending messages to the conference is 18 December. The searchable message archive is at https://listserv.fao.org/cgi-bin/wa?A0=RAS-L ]

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