ICT and AG Profile: Great Lakes Cassava Initiative

Supported by USAID’s Fostering Agriculture Competitiveness Employing Information Communication Technologies (FACET) project under the FIELD-Support LWA, this profile discusses the Great Lakes Cassava Initiative. GLCI was a four-year initiative (concluded in August 2012) designed to strengthen capacity in six Great Lake countries—Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda—to combat the already-present cassava mosaic disease and the emerging cassava brown streak disease pandemics. GLCI achieved its goal of reaching approximately 1.15 million farm families. The software facilitated the standardization of the M&E questions and the indicators across all 60-plus partners and across CRS. Through this process, CRS also realized that the real value of the ICT was that it enabled new ways to analyze the data and derive greater meaning from it.

The FACET project aims to help USAID missions and their implementing partners in sub-Saharan Africa use information and communications technology in sustainable and scalable approaches to improve the impact of their agriculture related development projects.