A two-day workshop on Agricultural Information System (AGRIS), designed to help the Asante Mampong College of Agriculture (CAGRIC) of the University of Education of Winneba (UCEW) to establish an institutional repository on Agriculture, using ICT as the means, opened on Wednesday at Asante Mampong.
It, aimed among others, at offering the opportunity to the participants to brain-storm and generate knowledge and information with the view to establishing an institutional repository on Agriculture for the CAGRIC.
The workshop is organized by the Institute for Scientific and Technological Information (INSTI) of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in conjunction with CAGRIC.
It is being facilitated by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) with the support of the Department for International Development (DFID) of United Kingdom.
The two-day workshop is being attended by twenty-two participants drawn from some research institutions affiliated with CSIR, Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA) and College of Agriculture.
Opening it, Mr. Clement Entsua-Mensah, Director of INSTI underscored the importance of the workshop and said it also aims at formatting Information, Communication, Management and Technology (ICM-T) policy and strategy for the management of Agriculture information CAGRIC.
He stated that the workshop would enable the participants to gather information about how the institution views ICT, its current capabilities and how ICT tools could in knowledge generation and dissemination.
Mr. Entsua-Mensah called on participants to strive and capture the knowledge that would be generated in electronic format and store it in the institutional repository for the benefit of the academic community and farmers in the area.
He said one of the objectives for AGIRS was to generate, collect and disseminate Agricultural information with the view to boosting Agriculture in Ghana and the world at large.
According to him, due to funding constraints, FAO was only able to provide support to only seven institutions in the country to begin the AGIRS project on a pilot basis.
The Director INSTIS mentioned these institutions as Food Research Institute (FRI), Animal Research Institute (ARI), Coca Research Institute of Ghana (CRIG), INSTIS, Forestry Research Institute of Ghana (FORIG) all under the CSIR, MOFA AND CAGRIC.
Professor Richard T. Awuah, Principal of CAGRIC in a welcoming address described the project as important and said the college was fortunate to be the only faculty selected among the five public universities for the project.
He explained that the choice CAGRIC for the project was premised on its ICT infrastructural and manpower as well as the interest shown by the leadership of the college.
Dr. Godfred Frimpong, a Senior Research Scientist of CSIR, one of the facilitators stated that the ultimate goal was to collect whatever knowledge that would be generated by CAGRIC into data base that would be made accessible first to the institution and ultimately to the global scientific community.