FANRPAN’s programmes fall into four main areas:

• Food Security – especially looking at the impact of policies on food systems, poverty reduction, biosafety and trade flows.
• Agricultural Input and Output Markets – focusing on how access to technologies and inputs, such as seeds, fertilizers and germplasm, can boost productivity and improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers
• Natural Resources and the Environment – looking at issues which require cross-border policy solutions, such as biofuels, land management and climate change,
• Social Protection and Livelihoods – focusing on cross-cutting issues such as the impact of HIV and AIDS on agriculture and food security, gender and youth in order to target humanitarian and developmental interventions more successfully

FANRPAN is an African-led, multi-stakeholder policy analysis network in southern Africa whose membership comprises universities, research institutes, business, government agencies and civil society organisations in southern Africa (Angola, Botswana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe). The network strives to promote, influence and facilitate quality agricultural research and dialogue to achieve a food secure Africa free from hunger and poverty.

Dr. Lindiwe Majele Sibanda, CEO at FANRPAN, says:

Proper policy research and advocacy is critical to helping policymakers reduce the levels of poverty and hunger in Africa. In the last 10 years, FANRPAN has developed a strong and inclusive network at the forefront of the agricultural debate in sub-Saharan Africa. We want to increase the visibility of the network’s research to boost progress towards solving the global food crisis. Glasshouse Partnership will play a key role in helping us bring our messages to global audiences.

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT has launched the Digital Revolutions short film competition to get a snap-shot of how technology and information impacts on lives today. The public is being urged to show creatively, in under 3 minutes, what this means to them.

To help, workshops have been organised across the UK in London, Cardiff, Sheffield and Edinburgh from 31st August-3rd September on consecutive days. These free one-day workshops run by leading documentary filmmakers are designed to help potential entrants get their creative ideas together, as well as to provide advice and tips on how to produce and market a short film. More information on the schedule for the day, including how to sign up, can be found here: http://digitalrevolutions.eventbrite.com.

Apart from the chance to take part in this creative project and learn something new, the Institute has put up a £10,000 prize for the winner of the amateur short film prize. £5,000 is the top prize for the professional category. In addition, anyone who enters their film before 17th September will be entered into a prize drawer to win an iPad.

There are no limits to the number of entries an individual can make before the competition closes at Midday on Friday 15th October. More information on the competition, including how to sybmit a valid entry, is available on the competition home page or at digitalrevolutions@bcs.org.

Watch this short video to hear award winning producer Sean Coleman, who will be running one of the sessions at the regional workshops, talk about what the competition is hoping to discover.

Sean Coleman on Digital Revolutions from Glasshouse Partnership on Vimeo.

The campaign called the Information Pioneers set out to highlight the heroes and heroines behind technology. Why? Because as a charity The Chartered Institute for IT has a mandate to educate and inform the public about the benefits of computing and computer science. Digital and social media clearly have many advantages for charities looking to engage the public – immediacy, interactivity, efficiency.  But equally the web is so full of things to engage with, standing out is a problem. We  were conscious we had to find ways of cost effectively getting people’s attention and involvement in a environment where attention spans are shorter and competition for eyeballs let alone engagement is vicious.  And without advertising.

Here are five lessons from the experience:

1.              Community insight is key

Traditional planning would seek to unlock the motivation of the individual. Digital campaigning needs to unlock the motivations of communities. Alan Turing won this campaign because there were several communities who felt he was important to them and cared enough to mobilize behind him. The Bletchley Park community for his work in the war, the gay community for his mistreatment at the hands of the State and the IT academic community for his work.  Planning with a view to maximizing the potential communities of interest on a competition like this is critical.

2. Internal support comes first

By involving BCS members in the selection process we knew we would be able to harness the support of a network of fans, voters and promoters from day one. We were also able to get a number of IT corporations behind this because they could see a value to supporting their founder or CEO – from a  corporate marketing perspective.

3. Everybody can help

In a social media environment, everyone is valuable. That doesn’t mean some may have more power to influence or amplify what you’re doing – some do. But it also means that quite small, personal networks of friends, family (as well as professional networks) are worth engaging with. One email to ex colleagues at Klenk & Hoursch triggered a flood of site visits and votes from Germany.

4.            Media relations stills count

We had quite a short campaign timeline – just over a month. Unless you’ve got a mainstream, heavily endorsed story and an advertising budget, that’s not a great amount of time to get people engaged. So big media hits count. They get the campaign read about, re-tweeted, ‘dug’ etc. Key bloggers count too. A few big ‘circ’ bloggers were responsible for the campaign getting picked up in the USA and Amercians counted for more video views than any other nation. So never underestimate the power of a good story and a high quality media relations pitch.

5.             Quality content counts

The films were embedded in over 250 sites from main stream media like the Daily Telegraph. This was because the content was relevant, engaging and high quality  (the Telegraph used one of the films online for a month and sold advertising space around it). We got the same reaction from bloggers – the films were high quality so added appeal to their blogs. People were proud to be associated with content of this quality. The days of cheap and cheerful content are going fast.

The Farming First guide outlines the key policy objectives of each global and regional initiative and how they identify these policies should be implemented.

Last year in L’Aquila, Italy, G8 leaders pledged US$20 billion (since revised to $22 billion) to address global food security.

Since the food crisis erupted in 2008, a large number of  food security initiatives have been launched or strengthened in response. The L’Aquila statement and the subsequent launch in 2010 of the Global Agriculture and Food Security Programme (GAFSP) are important illustrations of the commitment to action of countries around the world.

Food security is a complex issue requiring concerted efforts over the long term. The increased attention and leadership around this issue is a very positive development.  However, while this renewed attention and action are welcomed and needed, the proliferation of parallel separate initiatives also requires that the risk of overlapping, competing or disjointed activities is addressed.

As we move towards action on these food security policies, Farming First urges G8 leaders to:

1. promote a clear joint focus on a common goal for food security at the global level through policy and operational coherence
2. encourage increased transparency on how much of pledged funding has been committed and to what types of programmes
3. engage a wide range of stakeholders to ensure that our efforts are coordinated, clear, collaborative and ultimately successful.

How the many current programmes are coordinated and jointly contribute to food security is unclear. In the UN system, the Secretary-General’s High-Level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis (HLTF) represents an effort at giving an overarching direction but how non-UN efforts relate, for instance, to the Comprehensive Framework for Action (CFA) developed by the HLTF, is not articulated.

Additionally, despite a great amount of funding pledged by many countries to support food security initiatives, we do not know how much and in what ways it has been delivered. For instance, the L’Aquila statement included targeted investments as well as support for innovation, research and technology as essential components of long-term food security.

Finally, how the relevant stakeholders required for successful policy implementation can interact with these programmes is also in many cases undefined. Farmers, scientists, civil society and the private sector need to be involved in order to ensure plans meet existing needs and are successfully implemented. For instance, Farming First suggests that the GAFSP does have a dedicated seat for farmers and the private sector on its Steering Committee, given the essential role that the Committee will play in supporting initiatives around the world that will affect farmers.

Farming First urges G8 leaders to renew their commitments to food security at this year’s summit, and we welcome the opportunity for further collective action in addressing the hunger and poverty concerns at the heart of sustainable development.

The ad goes on to say that Cathay Pacific goes “the extra mile to make you feel special”, and then its asks me to “go online to meet [her] and other members of the team.”

Let it be said, I have a lot of respect and admiration for people who are good listeners, but the way this Cathay Pacific ad represents women is sad. I thought we had left eras like this behind long ago.

Personally, when I fly, I like talking with (not at) flight attendants.  And it also seems to me that talking would be a fairly integral aspect of their jobs, no?

But more than that, the ad wreaks of a quite disappointing form of Orientalism.  Interestingly though, the term Orientalism was a term originally used to describe the way that Westerners would objectify Eastern cultures and people.  In this case, it is a Hong Kong airline depicting its own staff this way.

In my opinion, a much better example of an airline campaign are the New Zealand Airline ads “Personality Allowed” where flights attendants do quirky or creative things to highlight their personalities.

Cathay Pathetic…

The campaign, which aims to reposition the image of the IT profession and get it recognized as being interesting, relevant and fun, centers on five short films. The five-minute films, each fronted by a celebrity, celebrate the lives of five Information Pioneers in turn. The public is asked to vote for their favourite, and at the moment, Alan Turing, promoted by Kate Russell, is leading the way.

The films also went live on MSN.co.uk this week, and have been taken up by a range of media outlets across sectors, including Telegraph TV, Financial Mail Women’s Forum, Pink Paper and Culture24 .

It’s hoped that by seeing the IT profession on a new light, more young people will consider computing as a career or study path. In particular the Institute is committed to getting more women into the profession.

However the campaign also seeks to give IT professionals the recognition that they deserve. In addition to the five short films there is a list of 150 IT Greats on the campaign website, which the public can also vote on.

If you haven’t seen the videos yet, visit: http://pioneers.bcs.org

The campaign can also be found on Facebook and Twitter (@infopioneers).

We asked people like Dom Joly, Phil Tufnell, Miranda Raison as well as IT and tech afficionados Kate Russell and Ortis Deley to work with the Institute to tell the story of five out of a list of 150 IT ‘greats’.  To stimulate the debate, we have created a micro-site and will be hooking up with MSN soon to broadcast the stories.  The movies themselves won’t air till next Thursday but in the meantime, we’re  hoping that PR’s and internal communications executives inside IT companies will check the site out.  Many of their CEOs or founders – people like Larry Ellison at Oracle – will be on the long list of 150. We’re hoping they’ll see the corporate PR value of getting behind their CEO and their corporate brand by voting him or her up the league table. We’re also hoping they’ll see the value to the industry too of inspiring young and old of the socially valuable role the IT industry and profession is playing in their lives.

But since much of my time these days is spent thinking about agriculture (from a variety of perspectives) on behalf of my clients, it struck me when two “food security” articles appeared in the Financial Times on the same day, one highlighting a surge in global cereal stocks and the other lamenting a serious famine in the West African country of Niger.

Below is the resulting letter to the editor, published in today’s FT (or read it here online).  It alludes to two interesting pieces of client work in which I am currently involved.  The first is the Farming First coalition which advocates for a farmer-centric, science-based set of solutions for sustainable agriculture; the second is a sub-Saharan African seed security initiative being implemented by the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN) – which also received coverage in the Guardian recently.

• -

(from the May 14 edition)

Sir, Two FT articles highlight how complex, and often befuddling, the issue of food security can be to manage. On one side, Javier Blas reports the US Department of Agriculture’s claim that “surging [cereal] production has … allayed recent concerns about the world’s ability to meet rising food, feed and fuel needs” (“Crop stocks set to rise for third year in a row”, May 12).

On the other side, Tom Burgis reports from Niger of “a food crisis spanning the Sahel” due to “high prices and lack of rain” (“Niger is on brink of food shortages”, May 12).

Whether it be food surge or food shortage, what these articles reveal is that food security at the global level is about much more than food availability. It is about local access to inputs and information as well as a set of policies that reflects farmers’ needs first. For example, the Southern African Development Community is piloting an innovative scheme to harmonise the seed regulatory systems in Malawi, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe so farmers can access quality seeds more reliably and at a lower cost.

Food security is about production, but it is also about policies.

Today, BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, published the first phase of a new study which looks at the links between access and use of IT and ‘life satisfaction’.

Using regression analysis on the World Values Survey the researchers concluded that access to information technology has a ‘statistically significant, positive impact on life satisfaction’. The report also shows that women in particular and those on lower incomes or with fewer educational qualifications are the ones that benefit most from access to and use of IT.

The conclusion is striking many as counter intuitive. Isn’t techno-addiction on the rise, after all? What about cyber bullying? No one is suggesting that IT is inherently good or bad. But what is does underline is that there is a direct and indirect link to personal life satisfaction.

From a political point of view is whether the the fact that there appears to be a link between access to IT and personal satisfaction will further energise the policy discussion around ‘digital exclusion’.

From a corporate communications point of view, what’s interesting is that this is an example of how products and servcies can opne up a discussion around their social impacts and purpose and move the debate about their value beyond economics.

The BBC are running the story and if you’re intrigued to see the full report it is available from the Chartered Institute for IT.