The Sweetpotato Action for Security and

Health in Africa (SASHA) is a five-year

initiative designed to improve the food security

and livelihoods of poor families in Sub-

Saharan Africa by exploiting the untapped

potential of sweetpotato. It will develop the

essential capacities, products, and methods to

reposition sweetpotato in food economies of

Sub-Saharan African countries to alleviate

poverty and under-nutrition.

Sweetpotato

knowledge

portal training

SWEETPOTATO ACTION FOR SECURITY AND HEALTH IN AFRICA

Sweetpotato Knowledge Portal

(SKP)

• This is a collaborative project where

sweetpotato professionals and scientists

come together to share, discuss, and

generate new knowledge.

• Recognize that SASHA had no dedicated

communication person

• Sustainable: using open source

technology (PLONE)

Why a portal?

• Many institutions and people have knowledge,

but lack efficient channel for sharing it

• Sweetpotato knowledge fragmented and not

easy to obtain

• Project driven research increases problems of

knowledge fragmentation

• Portal will live on after the SASHA project ends,

not project specific

Key elements of SKP

• Collaborative space where all are equal

• Most information publicly available, but

private project spaces

• Sweetpotato professionals can contribute

• Documentation and recognition of

contributions (Dublin core meta data)

• Portal based on knowledge structure, and

not on geography, institutions or projects

More elements of SKP

• Optimized for low bandwidth conditions,

especially reduction in ‘number of clicks’

• Very easy to contribute content and

search

• Easy to check for updates

• Easy to get overview of structure

Key statistics so far

• 4613 content items as of this morning

• 735 registered members

• Let’s look at some sections:

– Home page

– Sweetpotato projects/initiatives

– Breeding support

– SSA germplasm showcase

– Google group

15, 771

unique visits

to date

179

countries

45

African

New opportunities for knowledge

sharing

• Over 50 trained at SSP meetings

• Web 2.0 makes publishing content on

Internet very easy

• Internet availability improving rapidly in

SSA

• Collaborative spaces on Internet more and

more common

• It is very cheap!

Thank you

Luka M Wanjohi

L.Wanjohi@cgiar.org