Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa
Dgroups at FARA
by Myra Wopereis
Director of Knowledge and Technologies, FARA
2012 Dgroups Annual Meeting
15 Nov 2012

Outline
• Purpose of dgroups
• Current status
• Benefits
• Challenges
• Conclusion

Purpose of dgroups
Tool to assist FARA:
– as a forum to reach out (virtually) to diverse members across the
world
– to communicate and manage platforms across the continent

Current status
• Members
– 2528 from 102 countries
– Skills improving in use of dgroups (including ethics)
• sub communities : 50

Benefits
• Provides continuous link with
constituents in between the FARA
Science week held every 3 years
• Empowers non-research stakeholders
to engage in discussions on Africa’s
agriculture research, extension,
education initiatives.
• Advocacy and dissemination tool
• Focused discussions and management
of platforms

Challenges
• Management
– maintaining dynamic subcommunities and catalyzing discussions
– managing diverse skills and interests of members
– harnessing access to member details/profile
• Clear advantage compared to other tools i.e. social media tools
(ning, linkedin, etc.)
• Members
– understanding purpose of dgroups
– managing their own accounts
– following threads of discussions

Conclusion
• Clear benefits of dgroups to FARA
• Strengthen its use within the communications strategy
including social media strategy of FARA
• Rationalizing the subcommunities, members’ list
• Assessment of effective of dgroups for FARA
• Need for comprehensive strategy and plan to manage FARA
dgroups (dedicated staff to manage dgroups)

Key questions
• Monitoring and evaluation of dgroups
• Member’s database analysis, use, exporting to
other programs
• Management of main community vs.
subcommunity vs. subsubcommunity
– flow of information
– automatic membership

Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa
Thank you
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