FIDAMERICA is an Internet-based network of organizations and projects working with the rural poor in Latin America and the Caribbean.

It includes 30 IFAD-supported projects in almost all the Latin-American countries, involving about 500 000 poor rural households and 3 600 community organizations.

The mission of FIDAMERICA is to improve the access of the rural poor to information and knowledge, and to strengthen their capability to use these resources to improve local decision-making.

FIDAMERICA is a network of projects and institutions dedicated to fighting rural poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean by means of improving information and knowledge systems. Its purpose is to increase the efficiency and the impact of initiatives of sustainable agricultural developmerit in poor rural areas.

Objectives:

• facilitate the exchange of experiences and knowledge between the projects financed by IFAD in Latin America and the Caribbean;
• facilitate access to technical knowledge by the projects financed by IFAD;
• link these projects financed by IFAD to the information and knowledge resources available in networks such as Internet; and
• permit a rapid and efficient exchange of information between the directors of IFAD projects in each country and the staff of the Fund in Rome.

"Consider for a moment the information system spanning all of Latin America that has been put together by the Rome-based International Fund for Agricultural Development. The project is interesting for what it has not done. It hasn't bought computers or software, forcing farmers to find their own Internet access, perhaps at a nearby school. It has focused on using the technology, setting up a "virtual farmers market", for example, where Chilean potato farmers with an excess crop found willing buyers in Sao Paulo, Brazil."

The Wall Street Journal,: 7 July 1997

FIDAMERICA provides training to staff of IFAD-supported projects of rural organizations on the use of the Internet in rural development initiatives. FIDAMERICA also develops electronic services, such as on-line technical assistance systems, to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and information across the rural regions of Latin America.

"FIDAMERICA is not about computers or software... it is about people using modern technologies to solve real problems?'

Fawzi H. Al Sultan, President of IFAD

FIDAVANCE

FIDAVANCE is a modern and efficient system to promote the exchange of information and knowledge between individuals and organizations interested in Latin American agricultural and rural development.

From a technical point of view, this system operates by means of listserver software, which generates and administers a list with the e-mail addresses of the participants. Short messages, documents and, in general, any file with digital information, can be sent by the participants to the electronic address of the list. Almost immediately, the listserver retransmits the file to all the other participants, who will receive it in their electronic mail servers in a matter of a few minutes.

From a functional point of view, FIDAVANCE has allowed the exchange of experiences, of specific technical information, of information about upcoming events, of bibliographic references, and so on. In more general terms, a community of individuals has grown out of FIDAVANCE, willing to support each other in their search for ways to improve the access of resource-poor rural communities to knowledge and information and, in that way, to strengthen their decision-making capacity.

FIDAVANCE is possible thanks to a grant from the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

To subscribe to FIDAVANCE, send an e-mail message to listserver@conicyt.cl and, in the body of the text, write a one-line message saying:

"subscribe to fidavance <Your Name>"; if you need support to subscribe, please contact rimisp@reuna.cl.