Enhancing Ground Nuts Valve Chain Information Management Using the SUFACE Model for Improved Stakeholder Decision Making

Project Description:

Groundnuts (Gnuts) is the one of most important legumes in the food ecosystem of Ugandans as it provides alternative source of protein, income and food security (Okello et al., 2010; 2015). These legume is more versatile with multiple advantages and is mainly grown in drier areas of the country. The current approach to knowledge management in the value chain is largely manual and does provide reliable and timely information. Furthermore, training of farmers is done using text based production guides which have limited expressiveness to facilitate knowledge up take. Also Gnuts farmers is affected by weak extension systems as a results it has poor approached to pest and disease surveillance which often results into poor responses to outbreaks. The weak extension system leads to; poor information management, limited access to quality seeds, poor management of pest and disease outbreak, poor post-harvest handling, low yields and low returns to farmers. Therefore, this project seeks to establish a groundnuts knowledge management framework by scaling out capabilities of the tested SUFACE Model (Mirembe, 2015) to enhance information generation, visualisation and exchange. The knowledge management framework will use the novel community based extension service delivery models of; Key Farmer trainers (KFT) and University Outreach Community engagement (UOC) which uses model farmers and students respectively as extension agents (Mirembe, 2015). Data science techniques, geo spatial, mobile and web applications will be deployed in the framework. The evaluation will be done to determine the impact of enhance knowledge management on; extension service access, access to quality seeds, farmer skills, attitude and practices change among farmers.

Objectives
The overall objective of this baseline is to establish baseline indicators for the groundnut farmers towards the NARO groundnut project.
The specific objectives include;
a) To establish the social-economic status of the programme beneficiaries.
b) To establish the current ICT usage and access patterns among the stakeholders
c) Determine the baseline indicators for the implementation of the NARO groundnuts project.
d) Identify the potential challenges and opportunities for the project implementing team.

Organisation / Company: Makerere University Research and Innovations Grant

Project Year: 2021