Development of the Zambia Agriculture Management Information System(ZAMIS)

Abstract

Despite the important contribution the agriculture sector makes to household food and nutrition security and the national economy, it faces a number of challenges to increased productivity. Other than the natural calamities and socio-economic factors such as access to agriculture inputs, credit facilities and markets, poor access to agricultural information remains a decisive challenge to increased agricultural productivity at household level. The prevailing low crop and livestock productivity among small scale farmers could greatly be attributed to low farmer access to and utilization of agricultural technologies that are meant to enhance productivity. Utilization of such technologies has been poor among the small scale farmers because such information is not readily available. This situation is further worsened by the poor, inadequate and weak communication links between researchers, extension and farmers. All these factors consequently lead to low adoption of improved agricultural technologies among small scale farmers. Therefore, in order to improve agricultural production and productivity there is need to develop an agriculture information system. This project report highlights the importance of having an information system which facilitates the transfer and accessibility of agriculture technology. The vast store of information on agriculture has been built up in the Zambia over many years but the information is stored in various media that is not readily accessible by the intended end user. The information is needed by the farmers, extension officers, researcher's, policy makers, trainers and agriculture consultants. The development of the web-based agriculture Zambia Agriculture information system was the primary objective of the study. The information system will contain all the provinces of Zambia and their respective districts containing information on vegetation, climate, soil type, past research works, landforms and land use of a specific District. For this project only 7 Provinces were inserted. The data reviewed in this study is from the environmental impact assessment reports and from the soil map of Zambia with a scale 1: 1 000 000. The data base of the information system is WAMP server 2.0. The information system was developed using a waterfall model of lifecycle system of software development. The system is designed to be dynamic and embrace new changes.