Since the introduction of social media, communication is becoming more and more dynamic every day. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter have 1.18 billion and 316 million active monthly users as of 2015. Communication has become more virtual than physical. More and more people – young and old alike – are fascinated by the social media and it is a trend that is not going down very soon. For a long period in the future, social media is going to shape the way people interact, share information, form opinions and also lead individual and collective actions. In a world where social media etiquettes are probably more important than table manners, ignoring it is not something that the development sector can afford to do. Especially for agricultural extension and advisory services (AEAS), whose primary element is communication, social media can be a potential goldmine. The GFRAS global survey on use of social media in agricultural extension and advisory services conducted online across 60 countries and 226 respondents provides interesting results. 

The Community Knowledge Wworkers (CKW) system, a type of farmer-to-farmer extension, involves local networks of farmer-to-farmer peers serving as information intermediaries. They use smartphones and other information and communication technologies (ICTs) to reach fellow farmers with agricultural (livestock management, agronomic practices for crops), weather (seasonal and daily forecasts), and market price information. Their smartphone connects to a remote server called Salesforce, which provides access to real time agriculture, market price, and weather information.

Os Serviços de Extensão e Consultivos (EAS na sigla inglesa, Extension and Advisory Services)1 desempenham um papel importante no desenvolvimento da agricultura para segurança alimentar e da nutrição, soberania alimentar e estabilidade económica. No entanto, muitos serviços consultivos requerem novas capacidades para abordarem os atuais desafios que a agricultura enfrenta, a fim de contribuir melhor para a inovação agrícola – um processo que exige interações e o fluxo de conhecimentos entre uma vasta gama de atores no sistema de inovação agrícola (AIS na sigla inglesa, Agricultural Innovation System)2. Nos últimos anos, verificou-se que o cenário da extensão se tornou mais pluralista, com uma participação crescente do setor privado (insumos agrícolas, agronegócio, serviços financeiros), das organizações não-governamentais (internacionais e locais), grupos de produtores, cooperativas e associações, consultores (independentes e os ligados a associações de agronegócio e/ou de produtores) e serviços baseados nas tecnologias da informação e comunicação (TIC). Esse pluralismo, porém, não é bem compreendido por planeadores, decisores políticos, investigadores e até mesmo pelos consultores dos serviços de extensão.

This document gives an overview of the results of the evaluation of the 6^th GFRAS Annual Meeting.

The results shown are taken from the evaluation form provided to the participants. They were asked to evaluate the agenda and inputs, the opportunities for participation and the facilitation of the event, the organisation and preparation of the event, as well as topics for future meetings. In total, 90 of 130 participants provided their feedback to the event.

El documento fue elaborado por el Grupo de Comunicadores interesados en extensión rural de RELASER en base a la plantilla de buenas prácticas de FAO para la sistematización de experiencias para el aprendizaje continuo.

The 6^th GFRAS Annual Meeting took place from 14 to 17 September 2015, with side events on 14 and 18 September. Organised around the topic of Global Good Practices, this year’s annual meeting challenged participants to reflect on the process of generating, documenting, sharing, testing, and adapting knowledge and good practices.

130 participants of 54 countries and 12 regional networks argued that sharing, discussing, using, and adapting good practices are part of a wider and complex learning process in RAS. They discussed that learning happens at different moments, can be implicit or explicit, and is a complex and continuous cycle, involving many actors at different stages within agricultural innovation systems and beyond. Thinking about the potential benefits of sharing good practices, participants agreed that a good practice must be end-user oriented, demand-driven, and include best-fit considerations. While it is important to note that there is no ‘bad practice’ as long as we learn from it, for good practices to be really useful and beneficial for the end-users, we need to strategically decide what, when, and how we share our experiences.