Duddal project

The Duddal project in Niger, financed by the German cooperation agency GIZ, was born out of the realization that farmers' know-how was no longer being passed on: agricultural skills in communities were disappearing due to the ageing of agricultural advisors and the lack of training for younger generations. To solve this problem, the Duddal project team has built up a digital library of technical and educational resources of various kinds in the field of small-scale irrigation and rural development (posters, data sheets, reports, studies, maps, radio broadcasts, photographic files, videos, etc.). We host this collaborative library on our servers, and make it available online at the following address: https: //duddal.org

The 2nd phase of the project involved making the Duddal library available in offline mode to disseminate these resources in rural areas where Internet access is difficult or non-existent. To do this, we added it to 30 DataCups, one for each sub-region of Niger. This represents 30GB of data that agricultural advisors can consult at any time without an Internet connection, when they visit farmers to answer their questions and respond to their needs.

Following delivery of the DataCups, our team travelled to Niger to run a 3-day training workshop: the Duddal teams were able to gain autonomy in all maintenance matters, and we also transferred technical skills in building and repairing a DataCup.

During the course of the project, we were asked to create a prototype tablet - the Kibao, meaning tablet in Swahili - which would make it easier to view DataCup data without the need for additional devices. Farm advisors can thus transfer data loaded on the DataCup to their Kibao and view it more easily. This project will help consolidate the agricultural skills and knowledge of around 400 agricultural advisors.