Showing posts with label SPC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SPC. Show all posts

Monday, October 5, 2015

Social media revolutionising rural communities in the Pacific - Pacific Beat - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)


Social-media has been called many things -- and now it's being described as a 'life-changing' experience for people living in rural parts of the Pacific.

Increasingly, social media, and the internet in general, is being used to drive agricultural development - with some dramatic impacts.

Speakers: Michael Hailu, director of Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA); Giacomo Rambaldi, Sr Programme Coordinator, ICTs (CTA, Web2forDev) and Faumuina Felolini Tafunai, Media Specialist (WIBDI).

by Catherine Graue
Source: Pacific Beat | Duration: 5min 42sec

Thursday, April 16, 2015

Building Capacity in using social media for agricultural development in Cook Islands

Rarotonga, Cook Islands, 14 April, 2015 – From 13 to 17 April 2015 the Cook Islands Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) is hosting a Web 2.0 and social media learning opportunity workshop and training. The event held at the MoA’s headquarters in Arorangi, is jointly supported by the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA), and the European-Union-funded Pacific Agriculture Policy Project (PAPP) (part of the Intra-ACP Agriculture Policy Project). The Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC) is the implementing agency for the European Union funded PAPP project.

Participants in the course posing together
with the Minister of Agriculture, Kiriau Turepu
Participants were drawn from government agencies, including ministries of the environment, agriculture, education and internal affairs, the police and the Seabed Minerals Authority, from the private sector and from civil-society and non-governmental organisations, including the Red Cross, the National Youth Council, national women’s group, and two youth organisations Rotaract, and organics. All were keen to learn how to make best use of online social media tools to generate and share information to achieve both personal development and organisational goals.

The Hon Minister of Agriculture, Kiriau Turepu, delivered the keynote address to more than 25 local participants. He acknowledged the partnership of CTA, SPC and the European Union for offering the opportunity to the Cook Islands to build capacity in information and communication technologies and social media.

“I am particularly pleased for the Ministry of Agriculture to take the lead in promoting social media to generate, manage and disseminate information in this ever-more-connected world we live in. The internet offers tools we can harness for the development of our people. The outer islands may have produce to sell and using the internet they can connect to consumers and markets in Rarotonga. We will be able to share and show new innovative ideas such as growing dragon fruits for example – I can show a friend in Penrhyn steps on growing these fruits using social media.

“As the first of this kind of workshop to be held here in the Cook Islands, we are expecting this group of participants to learn, and make use of the knowledge so that our people are better informed, more articulated in the affairs of development as far as agriculture is concerned.

“Today the speed with which information travels in our work places and the changing technologies that we have at our disposal is extraordinary and important to all of us. Whether it is Facebook, blogging, Twitter, photos you share, these are all extensions of individuals and their personalities. They help portray interests, views and help show people who they are. They offer a platform for you and I to be ourselves, to be creative, to be who we want to be and most importantly, have an audience for all to debate critical innovative ideas that are good and can grow for the future.”

Mr Emil Adams, PPPP Information Communication Management Officer, thanked Permanent Secretary, Dr Matairangi Purea, and MoA Director of Policy, Planning, Mr Patrick Arioka, for the planning and coordination that went into organising the workshop. The good turnout of local participants is testimony of the planning, interest and enthusiasm of stakeholders to release their officers to attend the Web2.0 and social media training.

“Social media tools allow continuous dialogue between groups of individuals to take place on the internet. This online dialogue contributes to a knowledge society where individuals continuously pull information as well contribute content, further enriching knowledge and available to other users. People are empowered when they freely express their opinions on social media, and attain a level of gratification when they get information they want when they want it,” said Mr Adams.

“Accessing the internet allows a farmer in a remote village to directly interact and feedback on government policies affecting rural livelihoods, tweet a photo of a pest outbreak back to researchers for identification and management, or post on Facebook photos of a rural development training.”
Workshop facilitator, Ms Anju Mangal, offered words of warning about the potential of social media, noting that, while it can open up a whole new horizon of possibilities that can improve lives, it can also destroy lives and upset social norms if used wrongly by unscrupulous individuals.

Ms Mangal said that online cyber security is of major concern to individuals and to organisations that want to protect their integrity. Social media policies supported by national infrastructure need to be robust to guide the use of these tools to achieve national goals. Above all, measures are needed to prevent compromising the integrity of government machinery.

In the Cook Islands broadband connection is available to more than 95% of the population, with mobile coverage reaching more than 99% of the population. On Rarotonga only, third-generation (3G) services are available to 11,000 plus mobile connections.

Agriculture currently contributes only 3.8% to GDP, but Mr Arioka expressed his confidence that this can be increased through the use of online tools supported by an enabling policy environment. The Ministry is currently developing a new Strategic Plan to help agriculture services support income streams, food consumption and self sufficiency. Healthy soils, healthy food will underpin the strength of the new Strategic Plan.

CTA, in partnership with SPC, has embarked on a series of regional Web2.0 and social media learning opportunity workshops to strengthen national capacity in the use of social media for agricultural development and climate-change adaptation. National workshops have been completed in Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Samoa and Vanuatu. A second national workshop for the Cook Islands is planned for September 2015.

Here is a link to follow for more information on forthcoming training events.

Follow Web2forDev on Facebook, Twitter and Vimeo and join the community on DGroups and LinkedIn


Friday, October 17, 2014

Web 2.0 and Social Media spread like wildfire in Vanuatu

Group photo of participants of the Web 2.0 and Social Media
training in Port Vila, Vanuatu 2014
Friday 17 October 2014, Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC), Vanuatu – Vanuatu is a young state as far as information and communication technology (ICT) is concerned and the development of ICT is very important for the socio-economic growth of the country.'  The first Political Advisor for the Vanuatu Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Mrs Emily Tumukon, made this statement in her opening remarks at the beginning of a five-day training workshop on the use of web 2.0 and social media in Port Vila, Vanuatu on 13 October.

The Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC), in collaboration with the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA), promotes information and knowledge sharing, learning and communication for the agriculture and forestry sectors, using low-cost technology – Web 2.0 and Social Media.

CTA-developed curriculum is designed to help users interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue. Examples of Web 2.0 applications include blogs, , Google Drive, Google +, video sharing sites, photo editing, and sharing social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. These web tools are used in the context of development work and are designed for stakeholders actively engaged in agriculture and rural development / natural resource management in the domains of ICT for development, policies and markets, publishing, communication and media.

Mr Hannington Tate, Vanuatu's Director of Forestry, believes that new ICT tools such as web 2.0 can improve agricultural and forestry information in rural and remote communities of Vanuatu. He maintains that this type of workshop also offers a platform where participants from the government line agencies and those representing different stakeholders can come together to share their experiences and eventually find out how they can collaborate by making use of each others’ networks in order to better reach and serve the people of the country.

The Vanuatu Government CIO (Chief Information Officer), Mr Fred Samuel, stated that the Vanuatu Government recognised ICT as an enabler for social and economic development in the country.  He emphasised that it is now important to create online content that users and citizens can access, and that is the reason such training is needed. He added that web 2.0 represents an important shift in the way digital information is created, shared, stored, distributed, and manipulated.

The five-day learning opportunity is currently under way in Port Vila. Twenty-three participants – fifteen men and eight women – from different organisations are attending it. The event is part of CTA’s effort to facilitate access to and dissemination of information in the fields of agriculture and rural development in 78 countries in the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States (ACP), this being the sixth to be held in the Pacific. Similar workshops have been conducted in Papua New Guinea and Fiji and a one is planned for Samoa in two weeks' time that will focus on the agriculture and forestry sectors.

Sponsored by the ACP-EU CTA, the event, titled Web 2.0 for Development and Social Media Learning Opportunity, is undertaken by the Secretariat of the Pacific Community in collaboration with the Vanuatu Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Forestry, Fisheries, and specifically the Department of Forests (DoF) and Biosecurity and the Office of the Government’s Chief Information Officer (OGCIO).