The Sweetpotato Action for Security and Health in Africa (SASHA) is a five-year initiative to improve food security and livelihoods in Sub-Saharan Africa by promoting the untapped potential of sweetpotato. It will develop capacities, products, and methods to position sweetpotato more prominently in Sub-Saharan African food economies to alleviate poverty and undernutrition. The Sweetpotato Knowledge Portal is a collaborative project where sweetpotato professionals and scientists share, discuss, and generate new knowledge. It provides an open-source platform for sharing fragmented sweetpotato knowledge and will continue operating after SASHA ends. Over 50 people have been trained to use the portal, which has over 4,600 content

1. Sweetpotato
knowledge
portal training
The Sweetpotato Action for Security and
Health in Africa (SASHA) is a five-year
initiative designed to improve the food security
and livelihoods of poor families in Sub-
Saharan Africa by exploiting the untapped
potential of sweetpotato. It will develop the
essential capacities, products, and methods to
reposition sweetpotato in food economies of
Sub-Saharan African countries to alleviate
poverty and under-nutrition.
SWEETPOTATO ACTION FOR SECURITY AND HEALTH IN AFRICA

2. Sweetpotato Knowledge Portal
(SKP)
• This is a collaborative project where
sweetpotato professionals and scientists
come together to share, discuss, and
generate new knowledge.
• Recognize that SASHA had no dedicated
communication person
• Sustainable: using open source
technology (PLONE)

3. Why a portal?
• Many institutions and people have knowledge,
but lack efficient channel for sharing it
• Sweetpotato knowledge fragmented and not
easy to obtain
• Project driven research increases problems of
knowledge fragmentation
• Portal will live on after the SASHA project ends,
not project specific

4. Key elements of SKP
• Collaborative space where all are equal
• Most information publicly available, but
private project spaces
• Sweetpotato professionals can contribute
• Documentation and recognition of
contributions (Dublin core meta data)
• Portal based on knowledge structure, and
not on geography, institutions or projects

5. More elements of SKP
• Optimized for low bandwidth conditions,
especially reduction in ‘number of clicks’
• Very easy to contribute content and
search
• Easy to check for updates
• Easy to get overview of structure

6. Key statistics so far
• 4613 content items as of this morning
• 735 registered members
• Let’s look at some sections:
– Home page
– Sweetpotato projects/initiatives
– Breeding support
– SSA germplasm showcase
– Google group

7. 15, 771
unique visits
to date
179
countries
45
African

8. New opportunities for knowledge
sharing
• Over 50 trained at SSP meetings
• Web 2.0 makes publishing content on
Internet very easy
• Internet availability improving rapidly in
SSA
• Collaborative spaces on Internet more and
more common
• It is very cheap!

9. Thank you
Luka M Wanjohi
L.Wanjohi@cgiar.org