Livelihoods are rural people’s greatest defense against hunger and malnutrition. Crises undermine rural livelihoods and erode people’s capacity to cope with the next shock. In humanitarian contexts, FAO brings wide-ranging technical expertise and operational experience to the fore to safeguard livelihoods and enable crisis-hit and at-risk people to access and start producing food as quickly as possible. Protecting livelihoods by providing emergency agricultural assistance from the onset of a crisis is crucial to save lives, while enabling people to produce food and earn an income.

The Unites States Agency for International Development (USAID) Feed the Future De-veloping Local Extension Capacity (DLEC) project conducted a three-country study on youth and EAS in Rwanda, Niger and Gua-temala. These case studies provided a land-scape analysis to inform actions to strengthen the inclusion of youth in EAS to improve their livelihoods and increase the effective-ness of EAS systems.

During May 2010 the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) hosted two events related to knowledge management (KM): The Knowledge Share Fair for Latin America and the Caribbean, funded by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and a regional meeting of the Knowledge Management for Development (KM4Dev) community. The Fair was attended by 200 professionals from more than 70 organizations and 18 countries and showcased more than 40 experiences related to KM in agriculture, development and food security.

This Module is the first in a series of four that address capacity development competencies in FAO. It is intended to provide FAO staff and consultants with a basic understanding and knowledge of Capacity Development (CD), reflecting the international debate as well as FAO’s perspective on CD. It also provides some key concepts for adopting changes in responsibilities, behaviours and attitudes that are consistent with FAO’s new role in CD. 

Society’s learning capacity in the field of sustainable land resource management is at stake and more emphasis on knowledge management is needed to guarantee that the accumulated knowledge is shared in such a way that the right actors have appropriate knowledge at the right time to take the best decisions. Efficient policies governing structures for national and regional knowledge management need to be formulated and the working procedures of the various actors in the field need to be defined more sharply.

This paper reviews the state of current scientific knowledge on the links between climate change, agriculture and food security, in terms of anticipating impacts, managing climate variability and risks, accelerating adaptation to progressive climate change, and mitigating greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector.

This presentation by the Iowa State University Extension (USA) is on agriculture and extension in the USA, focussing on challenges in ICT and emerging paradigms.

The government of Ethiopia gives great attention to agriculture and rural development for the country’s economy development. Dairy development is one of the components of agricultural development. To improve dairy production in certain locality, dairy producers should able to access and use appropriate knowledge for the particular problem at the right time. This research was conducted to assess agricultural knowledge management system and its challenges and opportunities of knowledge management processes in Bure district.

Georeferenced data are a key factor in many decision-making systems. However, their interpretation is user and context dependent so that, for each situation, data analysts have to interpret them, a time-consuming task. One approach to alleviate this task, is the use of semantic annotations to store the produced information. Annotating data is however hard to perform and prone to errors, especially when executed manually. This difficulty increases with the amount of data to annotate.