ILRI Comms project insight 2014:
LIVES project knowledge management
and communication
Fanos Mekonnen
CKM Team Meeting
Addis Ababa, 2-4 February 2015

About LIVES project
1. Why is it important
- Avails easier access to agricultural information and resources
- Improves quality of extension service delivery
- Improves scaling out of lessons and best practices in research and
development
2.What is it
- Blogging- Stories about local issues and activities by experts on the
ground
- Establish resource centers- ICT equipped agricultural resource centers
- Testing E-book readers usability by development experts
3. What we want to achieve
- Easier access to relevant and timely information for those at
grassroots
- Build capacity and skill of development experts

Our activities
1. Produced 60 blog stories that were published on the LIVES page
and shared on ILRI social media sites and others
2. Established 25 Agricultural resource centers at district and zone
levels – All equipped with ICT tools and many connected to the
internet
3. Distributed E-book readers and followed up with half of the
recipients on the usability and challenges
4. Shared about 700 pictures from the field on LIVES flickr page

What we learned
1. There are lots of interesting stories from the field worthy of
sharing, but consistent pushing is required from comms staff to
keep them coming
2. Continuous follow up is a must once resource centers are
established as awareness, skill and capacity vary greatly among
the users/officials . Same goes for E-readers
3. Pictures from the field are good but not good enough. More work
needs to be done on that.

The presentation has a Creative Commons licence. You are free to re-use or distribute this work, provided credit is given to ILRI.
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