Pct35

Africa RISING PCT #35
03 April 2019
Skype call

Confirmed for the meeting

1. Siboniso Moyo (SM)
2. Bernard Vanlauwe (BV) - Chair
3. Peter Thorne (PT)
4. Carlo Azzarri (CA)
5. Jonathan Odhong' (JO) - Secretary
6. Irmgard Hoeschle-Zeledon (IHZ)
7. Jerry Glover (JG)
8. Beliyou Haile (BH)

Agenda

1.Updates on action points-from PCT 34 meeting

-Revised data management plan

-Feed the future indicators and targets

-Africa RISING web presence

-Internally commissioned external review

2.Taskforce to promote harmonization across Africa RISING and SI domain stewards

3.Any Other Business

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Updates on action points from previous PCT meeting

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>>Revised data management plan

Updates

• CA - The revised plan was finalized and uploaded to CG Space at - https://hdl.handle.net/10568/100536
• CA - The data management plan was also shared with USAID data management and support lead Anna Brenes on 28 February. She acknowledged receipt and will get back to CA/IFPRI team about it in mid-March.
• CA - Progress is being made with registration of AR data sets on Development Data Library (DDL). The problem at the moment is that data which was uploaded previously to CKAN didn’t have a distinction between multi-year and single-year experiments wasn’t there. This has therefore become a challenge for the upload because the DDL template requires this distinction. As a result, all data sets on CKAN and Dataverse are now restricted, but the M&E officers will be working on this in the coming weeks and months to identify which data sets are multi-year/are not and then make the single-year data open so that they can be linked to the DDL.

Action: JO to ask Gundula for an update on the discussions with USAID regarding the upload of sensitive qualitative data.

>>Feed the future indicators and targets

• JG - This item was actioned through an email to CA,IHZ & PT.

>>Africa RISING web presence

Update: JO - Africa RISING web presence is ongoing, current work on the revamped website expected to be complete by the end of June 2019. The private site where current progress can be reviewed is: http://africa-rising.sisitech.com

>>Authorization to spend 2019

JG – The budget for our PIO was sent to congress. It hasn’t been cleared yet, but we expect it to go through soon. It is a matter of ‘when’, not so much ‘if’ the funds will come. At the moment there is nothing that your respective organizations can act on.

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Internally commissioned external review

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Final team of 3 reviewers agreed - Jim Ellis-Jones, Mark Powell & Nancy McCarthy. Details about the budget for the review and how the lead organizations will share the costs are captured on the Google drive document link sent to all PCT members by the secretary.

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Taskforce to promote harmonization across Africa RISING and SI domain stewards

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Deatailed discussions about this topic are captured on the minutes for-PCT 33.

Update:IHZ – We had a call this morning together with PT and from our discussion it was proposed that we should probably have a categorization of standards for minimum data sets beyond the ones that were agreed on in Lilongwe in October 2018. PT will come up with the ToRs for a taskforce to look into the minimum data sets standards that all partners should capture.

Action: The harmonization group (IHZ & PT) to update the PCT to follow up ensure that the harmonization group is making progress to implement on the priority harmonization action points that were agreed upon.

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Any Other Business

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• SM – Are Africa RISING Project sites in Malawi & Zambia also affected by the recent cyclone Idai?
• IHZ – I had a Skype call with the AR Malawi activities coordinator, Regis Chikowo and he informed me that the cyclone didn’t affect our project sites in Malawi. There was a lot of water, but this happened when they were already harvesting the trials. In Zambia since we are only in the Eastern Province there shouldn’t be a problem there.