On September 26th the 4th inter-regional consultation on Information and Communications Management for Agricultural Research for Development (ICM4ARD) was held in Rome, during the e-Agriculture Week.
ICM4ARD is a GFAR Global Partnership Programme started in 2004 with the purpose of enabling “more equitable access to agricultural information globally for ARD stakeholders through improved ICM and more efficient use of ICT in National, Regional and Global agricultural information systems”
Since the 1st Expert Consultation on International Information Systems for Agricultural Science and Technology (IISAST) was held in 2005, GFAR has actively participated in the IISAST initiative and co-operates with the other IISAST stakeholders to promote synergy and coherence in international information systems for agricultural science and technology. The initiatives through which GFAR contributes to this multi-stakeholder effort towards coherence are the ICM4ARD GPP and the EGFAR Taskforce. 

This year, the ICM4ARD and EGFAR meetings took place a few days after the 2nd Expert Consultation on IISAST (see article in this issue), and drew on related discussions and outcomes of the Consultation. 

The ICM4ARD consultation was the occasion for a review of the project, which highlighted some major achievements, particularly as regards the strengthening or establishing of Steering Committees/Task Forces of all Regional Agricultural Information Systems (RAIS), the development of their websites, the studies on the ICM status in the regions, the development of toolkits for the National Information Systems (NAIS) and the re-engineering of EGFAR to contribute to development of an ARD Web ring. The review also stressed that there are areas where the targets have been slow to be realized, such as capacity development of NAIS managers, the development of distributed databases on Institutions, Experts, Projects and Project outputs, monitoring and evaluation, and attracting funds.

The discussion on future priorities focused mainly on: sensitisation of senior NARS leaders and policy makers; attraction of donor investment; improvements in monitoring and evaluation; and improvements in content generation and its management. It was recognized that in addition to ICM policy development at global, regional and national levels, the major focus needed to be on individual institutions having clear policy frameworks on how the outcomes of research and development activities are communicated to stakeholders and beneficiaries. It was recognised that all the partners active in the Task Forces of the IISAST initiative (including GFAR and Regional Forums) would be taking the lead in developing this framework as a tool for further advocacy and support to NARS, in the form of guidelines for development and implementation of ICM policies. The outputs would be advocated under the ICM4ARD GPP. These policies should look at issues in generating, processing and using more effectively information through ICT-enabled systems for ARD at the Institution and ARD Systems level.