Grant for ASHC Handbook for ISFM to be printed
ASHC has received a grant from the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) of €10,000 towards the printing of copies of the Handbook for Integrated Soil Management.
This will support the printing of 3,000 English and 700 French copies.These manuals will be disseminated free of charge and will available for download under a Creative Commons agreement. 500 English and 300 French copies of the ASHC will be supplied to CTA for them to distribute.
James Watiti of ASHC explains how ASHC intends to get these manuals into the hands of the people that need them most. He said: “The AGRA-funded Country-level Soil Health Consortia will be one important avenue for the physical distribution of these manuals.
ASHC is also collaborating with a partnership project with RUFORUM to increase access to CABI knowledge and publications products to universities in Africa. A dissemination plan will be developed that targets the RUFORUM library network which will provide a ready outlet for the books to an academic/university audience.”
The Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM) is located at Makerere University and has 32 university members in Eastern, Central and Southern Africa.
James continues: “This will be the first time that hard copies of the manual have been available in French. This is important because internet access in many of the French-speaking West African nations is very low. For example, internet use in Burkina Faso in 2012 was estimated at only 3.7 users per 100 inhabitants and just over 643,000 in total. In these situations access to hard copies becomes more important.”
Please contact James Watiti at ASHC if you have suggestions for events or networks to get these publications where they are needed most.
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To make this possible, CTA has organised its activities under two operational programmes:
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Also see: ASHC launches ISFM handbook