CIALCA-Base

The Consortium for Improving Agriculture-based Livelihoods in Central Africa (CIALCA) is an innovative research-for-development partnership operating in Burundi, eastern DR Congo and Rwanda. CIALCA is led by IITA, Bioversity International and FAO/IAEA and has a 12-year legacy of conducting agricultural research for development in Central Africa. Since its initial establishment in 2006 the Consortium has been supported by the Belgian Directorate General for Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Aid (DGD). Since its establishment in 2006, CIALCA has been operating along 3 integrated Pillars. They form the foundation of CIALCA and the basis for the success of CIALCA in the Great Lakes Region. In operationalizing its strategy, CIALCA works with government, public and private partners on three cross-cutting themes: entrepreneurial farming, ICT for Agriculture, and integrated agricultural systems for nutrition.

CIALCA invests heavily in developing smart ICT4Ag decision support tools, and training colleagues, students and decision-makers in using the tools to develop and implement more impactful agricultural development strategies. All CIALCA data is collected using Open Data Kit (ODK) systems that feed into a centralised database that is freely accessible for our CIALCA network and partners. CIALCA collaborates with other CGIAR Big Data initiatives such as RHoMIS and African Cassava Agronomy Initiative (ACAI) to ensure that CIALCA data can be integrated at regional and global level. It allows for the development and implementation of agricultural strategies that respond to the needs of different types of farmers in the Great Lakes Region. One of the outputs of the collaborative work of CIALCA and the move towards wholly digital data collection is CIALCA-Base.

CIALCA-Base has been developed as a repository of all household surveying performed historically, presently, and part of future of CIALCA work. CIALCA-Base brings together from within the consortium, PhD and master students, and CIALCA co-funded research. CIALCABase is a collaborative resource for CIALCA researchers, students, and partners to be understanding the minutiae and diversity of farming households across central Africa.

CIALCA-Base currently includes household survey data from more than 3500 households collected from two countries. This data has been collected from the current phase of the consortium (2017-2020). However, CIALCA researchers are working hard to bring data online from surveys performed for developing an initial baseline in 2006 and follow up data collected in 2014. This will allow CIALCA to develop panel analyses and begin to get an understanding of how farms across Burundi, DR Congo, and Rwanda have changed over the past 13 years.