For many years, The Essential Electronic Agricultural Library (TEEAL) has been improving access to scientific literature at developing world institutions with limited Internet capacity and/or financial resources. TEEAL offers a searchable, offline, digital library of agriculturally focused research journals, as well as journals in related subject areas.
AgriKnowledge has been developed as an online partner to TEEAL. AgriKnowledge provides access to key information for agricultural development. Currently, over 1,000 documents produced in conjunction with programs and projects sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), the Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA), and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) are available through AgriKnowledge. We anticipate further collections from related organizations to be added over the course of the next year, as well as additional material for each of the current collections.
Both TEEAL and AgriKnowledge are managed by Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University. TEEAL and AgriKnowledge are funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
TEEAL and AgriKnowledge would not be possible without support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Foundation has been an important source of funding for TEEAL since 2009. The Gates Foundation has also supported TEEAL outreach and training efforts led by our Africa-based partner, ITOCA (Information Training and Outreach Centre for Africa).
During TEEAL’s previous 2009-2013 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 115 new TEEAL sets were placed in 14 target countries in sub-Saharan Africa. With the need for an offline collection still evident, a new grant from the Foundation has funded a redesign of TEEAL and to place an additional 300 TEEAL sets in six target countries in Sub-Saharan Africa--Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda--as well as Bangladesh. This funding also supports the development of our new online agricultural resource, AgriKnowledge.
Key to both AgriKnowledge and the redesign of TEEAL is the inclusion of new research collections, the first of which is a collection of reports of research, programs and projects conducted for the Gates Foundation’s Agricultural Development Team.
The Bill & Melinda Gates works to help all people lead healthy, productive lives, focused on health, poverty, and opportunity. Their initiatives tackle some of the world’s toughest problems in the area of global health and development. For each issue, they seek to fund innovative ideas that could help remove barriers that prevent people from making the most of their lives.
As one of the largest initiatives at the Foundation, the Agricultural Development program seeks to reduce poverty for thousands of small-holder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia through a multi-faceted approach. Its interventions support work in a number of focus areas, including farmer services and systems, research and development, policies and data, livestock, and crop value chains.
AGRA is an independent African-led and Africa-based organization formed in 2006 in response to a call from former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Committed to putting farmers at the center of the continent’s growing economy, AGRA’s investments are primarily focused on Africa’s family farmers – those cultivating crops and tending livestock on less than two hectares of land. With headquarters in Nairobi and offices in Ghana, Tanzania, Mali and Mozambique, it works with partners in 18 countries to serve millions of farmers and thousands of local agriculture businesses. AGRA’s collection highlight Africa-focused material drawing from investments that embrace food production practices that are environmentally sustainable and economically inclusive. Their programmatic foci include seed systems, soil health, market access, policy & advocacy, farmer organizations, innovative finance, and gender.
ATA is a strategy and delivery oriented government agency created to help accelerate the growth and transformation of Ethiopia’s agriculture sector. The Agency’s mandate is focused solely on improving the livelihoods of smallholder farmers across the country. Based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the ATA was created to address systemic bottlenecks, catalyze transformation in the country’s agricultural sector, and support partners to execute new technologies, approaches, and interventions. The ATA collection reflects the agency’s work in its five main focus areas: production & productivity, agribusiness & markets, sustainable and inclusive growth, enhanced implementation capacity, and analytics.