Farming Programs at Africa Agriculture GIS Week

ESRI is to share ideas and knowledge on geographic information systems (GIS) for agricultural development at Africa Agriculture GIS Week (AAGW) 2010, to be held 8th 12th June in Nairobi, Kenya. Staff is available to meet with delegates and support agricultural programs for rural populations in less developed regions of the world.

"Food security and agricultural productivity initiatives are fully supported by ESRI," says Geoff Wade, natural resources solution manager, ESRI. "We are excited to be a part of this prestigious community. We look forward to contributing to solutions that ensure that people in every nation on earth are fed and have the opportunity for a sustainable livelihood."

A training workshop featuring ArcGIS Server will be hosted by ESRI on Friday 11th June. The workshop will cover a complete step-by-step process to create a variety of Web applications for enhanced collaboration between organisations. Attendees will learn how to use their own data to make maps and share them with others. Topics will include authoring maps, effective web editing, and how to select the appropriate end client application to support different workflows.

AAGW is organised by the Consortium for Spatial Information (CSI) of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR); HarvestChoice, an agriculture investment targeting program; Agricultural Geospatial Commons (AGCommons), a geospatial information program based in Africa; and other partners. ESRI is proud to support these organizations and has worked with CGIAR formally since 2002, bringing GIS technology to its network of research centres worldwide.

Through the training workshop and conference meetings at AAGW, ESRI wants to empower more organizations to share geospatial information through collaborative Web applications. An example is the HarvestChoice AgMarketFinder, a prototype application that helps locate potential markets in East Africa within an eight-hour travel time from a given location. The application was created with ESRI's ArcGIS Server and the ArcGIS Server API for JavaScript. Data comes from ArcGIS Online and is used with crop production and harvest data from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and transportation networks and waterways from Vector Map, a product available from the Multinational Geospatial Co-Production Programme (MGCP).