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CTA (the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation) was established within the framework of a co-operation agreement between the African, Caribbean and Pacific States (known collectively as the ACP states) and the European Union. This agreement referred to as the Lomé Convention, was put in place in order to improve the management of agricultural information in ACP countries. In June 2000, the ACP and EU States agreed on a new framework known as the Cotonou Agreement as the new basis for continued ACP-EU co-operation. CTA shares the stage with many other institutions in being called upon to support the ACP States. In response, it has defined its niche – those areas in which it has some comparative advantage and in which it can make a special contribution. The Centre acts as a broker between organisations and professionals in ACP and EU States. It seeks to establish fora for promoting dialogue and the exchange of information between organisations and professionals in ACP States in order to enhance their technical capacity and skills in information and communication management for agricultural development.

CTA’s two operational objectives are based on this new framework. The first is to improve the availability of, and access to, relevant, adequate, accurate, timely and well-adapted information on priority information topics for ACP agricultural and rural development. The second objective is to improve the communication management capacity of ACP agricultural and rural development organizations. Training programmes in information and communication management and strategy development are key instruments of these operational objectives. During visits to a number of institutions, the missions got the strong message that exposure to Web 2.0 applications would be highly welcome. This request was made more explicit by the group of ambassadors of Central Africa to the European Union, who approached CTA on the matter. To this effect CTA has conceived this intervention covering - for the time being - five countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

 The Training Programme has organised a series of Web 2.0 training courses in various regions of Africa. The first was in collaboration with the Commonwealth of Learning and RUFORUM in 2008. That course exposed the great need for this type of course especially in research and academic institutions. A follow-up course was run in 2009 with the Regional Universities Forum (RUFORUM) and two subsequent courses focusing for Web 2.0 Tools for Research Support and Networking in Africa were organised for West and central Africa in French and English in Ghana and Senegal in 2009. In 2010 CTA ran courses in Benin, Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria. The Nigerian courses were held in University of Ibadan, Rivers State University of Science and Technology and in the University of Agriculture, Abeokuta (UNAAB).

Objectives

The general objective of the Web 2.0 Opportunities is to improve the skills of researchers and development actors in the use of a variety of Web 2.0 applications for information retrieval, collaborative generation of content, information sharing and effective and cost-efficient communication. The aim is to improve networking and the management of agricultural information and among development actors. IITA.

 Learning Outcomes 

At the end of the course, participants will be able to:
• Identify and explore currently available Web 2.0 tools;
• Create alerts to obtain desired information streams;
• Subscribe to social networking sites;
• Publish their own content online using blogging applications;
• Curate information from websites
• Develop content on assigned topics using Web2.0 tools such as Wikis and Google Drive
• Utilise VOIP tools on the Internet to communicate with colleagues
• Utilise online mapping tools effectively
• Develop action plan for the use of collaborative tools in institutions in the region.

Our ultimate objective is that the course will create concrete and measurable changes that will be reflected in improved performance in the work places of each of the participants.