ITOCA's Reflection on the situation, outcomes and actions and developing indicators

Conduct Reflection Meeting

Tell me about your network

Gracian Chimwaza is the director of [ITOCA]. ITOCA has undertaken to study Soil Health Networks because our main core business is ICT for development
Basically we at ITOCA are researching/studying the soil health networks in Africa. We have the project on the role since we started in May and we have completed the 1st survey and now are working on analyzing the responses we got.
The soil health project aims to find what resources the networks share in terms of info and the pathways they use. For instance we have about 150 user respondents who are basically soil health specialists across Africa and in several networks.
The project is not a simple single network but it is made of several networks and the goal of our project is to identify all the existing soil health networks and encourage them to share info across networks since their goals are similar

1a. What do I think are the salient features of the situation that I face?

The major salient features are

The sharing of information amongst researchers
Access to Information on new technologies
Using the web/social networking tools to effectively share this knowledge across Africa through these communities of practice
Connecting the dots for information for these professionals and improve their work in soils health

1b. Why do I think those are the salient features?

The need to share info and get synergies across network seems like the value to add to these networks

2a. What outcomes do I think are desirable in this situation?

The desirable outcomes is that we actually get to map out ALL African Soil health networks and get them communicating amongst themselves.

2b. Why do I think those outcomes are desirable in this situation?

It seems to add value to what networks are already doing
The networks are already communicating WITHIN themselves and we are bringing the aspect of sharing across networks and learning from each other

3a. What actions do I expect to lead to those outcomes in that situation?

We are undertaking surveys with the members of the networks and the administrators and then learning on the resources they have and can share
After the surveys we should find exactly where the gaps are
We also map the networks and then we can concentrate on these gaps with solutions like using social networking tools like blogs and wikis where applicable
Ultimately (if we find more funding from other funders) we plan to take the project further and link these networks through a web portal and share resources over the portal

3b. Why do I think those actions will lead to those outcomes in that situation?

Because of the development in ICT we want to take advantage of IT and improve the networks communication capabilities