MANAGING INDIGENOUS AND EXOGENOUS KNOWLEDGE THROUGH INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES FOR AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT AND ACHIEVEMENT OF THE UN MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS IN TANZANIA

Approximately 1.2 billion people in the world live in extreme poverty. In that light, the first United Nations - Millennium Development Goal (UN-MDG) targeted eradicating extreme poverty and halving hunger by the year 2015. In support of the UN efforts, Tanzania set itself a goal to halve extreme poverty by 2010 and eradicate it by 2025. Poverty is principally a rural phenomenon and agriculture is the main economic activity for the rural population, therefore the reduction of hunger and poverty significantly depend on agricultural development. The expertise and knowledge to improve agricultural productivity and to reduce poverty are there. However, Tanzania's farmers are not only deprived from accessing global knowledge on agriculture, but they also lack opportunities to share their own indigenous knowledge. Information and communications technologies (ICTs) provide a possibility for rural farmers to share and preserve their own knowledge and use external information and knowledge. This paper addresses the extent to which ICTs can appropriately be used to manage agricultural indigenous knowledge to reduce extreme poverty and hunger in the rural areas of Tanzania. It also discusses ways that ICTs can be used to disseminate exogenous knowledge in the local communities in order to attain the first UN-MDG of reducing extreme poverty and halving hunger by the year 2015. Recommendations are given on how IK can be effectively managed using ICTs by citing examples from Tanzania.