Call for good and promising practices for the region of Europe and Central Asia

Deadline : 30th of November 2017 

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the e-Agriculture Community of Practice (CoP) are launching a call for good and promising practices on the use of ICTs for Agriculture in the region of Europe and Central Asia.

The call aims at collecting lessons learned and recommendations of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), also called digital technologies, for agriculture initiatives in Europe and Central Asia and sharing them among the members and followers of the e-Agriculture Community of Practice and beyond.

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 on good practices on the use of ICTs for Agriculture in Europe and Central Asia.

A presentation on experience capitalization and good practices in ICTs for agriculture is available in English and Russian, giving more information on the methodology. You can request methodological support from FAO, direclty on the e-Agriculture platform or via email: [email protected]

Topic

The good or promising practice you wish to document should be about the use of ICTs for agriculture, livestock, fisheries, forestry or rural development in general.. It can cover a wide range of topics such as the value chain, agrometeorological information, or precision agriculture. The proposed ICT for agriculture practices should be useful and accessible for smallholder farmers. We pay attention to gender issues and suggest taking them into account in the documentation. This call is focussing on practices from Europe and Central Asia.

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: www.fao.org/elearning/#/elc/en/course/EXCAP

Concept note: Good practices at FAO: Experience capitalization for continuous learning: http://www.fao.org/3/a-ap784e.pdf  

Deadline 

The deadline for submission of good and promising practices: 30 November 2017

Submissions 

Good and Promising Practices submissions should comply with the following:

• Use of the good practices template provided for this call
• Between 2,000 and 4,000 words
• Submissions for this call will be accepted in English and Russian
• Submissions should be written in plain, concise language, and in a style that is accessible and meaningful to all readers, including non-scientists, and readers for whom English/Russian is not a first language. Terms that may be unfamiliar to readers should be defined and explained the first time they appear.
• Every submission should contain 2 or 3 high-resolution pictures. Each picture needs to indicate copyright and a caption. 
• All citations and work of other authors should be referenced at the end of the document. Bibliographical references should include name of author(s), year of publication, title, place of publication and publisher (for books), journal title, volume and pages (for articles). The names of all authors of a work should be given in references. Where there are more than three authors in the reference, abbreviate to et al. in the text (but not in the reference). The name of the author is to be followed by the initials of the first name(s), year of publication, title of the document, journal or any other publication in which it appeared, name of the editor and number of pages. If the document is part of a collection, the title should be quoted in brackets at the end of the reference. If the document is also available on the Internet, the Internet address may follow the reference ("also available at www...").

Contact form for the author

The main author of the good or promising practice should fill out the following form and submit it together with the template.

Name and Last name:

Address:

Country:

E-mail address:

Telephone number:

Photo:

Short bio (10 lines max):

By submitting the good practice for the call, the author allows FAO and its partners to use the information and to publish the submitted document.

Send both documents to [email protected] with the following subject line « Submission Call for Good Practices »

Copy [email protected] for the submissions in English and [email protected]  for the submissions in Russian. 

Selection and publication

The jury of the call for good and promising practices will be composed out of 3 people: a knowledge management specialist, a member of the e-Agriculture team and a technical specialist. Additional information might be requested to the authors to ensure all elements important to the experience capitalization process are included.

Contact

For all information contact the e-Agriculture team: [email protected]

The submissions should be sent to [email protected] copying: 

• [email protected] for the submissions in English
• [email protected] for the submissions in Russian