In January 2001, a jet took off from the regional airport in Tigray, Ethiopia, a remote area north of the capital of Addis Ababa. Gracian Chimwaza, a native of Zimbabwe, was returning from a business trip to Mekelle University College, an agricultural university housed in a former military barracks in Tigray.

 

By chance, seated next to Chimwaza was the dean of Mekelle University's agricultural school, Mitiku Hailu. Striking up a conversation, Chimwaza asked the dean where he was traveling. "Switzerland," the dean replied. "I'm writing a paper on harvesting water in micro-dams in Tigray and I'm going to Geneva to do a literature review for this paper." 

The irony of this story is that Chimwaza had just been in Ethiopia on an outreach mission for The Essential Electronic Agricultural Library, or TEEAL. Nicknamed "The Library in a Box," TEEAL holds the full text of 140 leading agricultural journals on CD-ROMs. "When I pointed out to him that in the future he would be able to carry out such research from his office through TEEAL," Chimwaza says, "he was quite excited and wished he could secure funding to acquire TEEAL." 

That the dean of a university had to leave the continent to do a literature search reflects the dismal state of libraries in Ethiopia and throughout Africa. Increasing journal subscription costs are major hurdles for African countries, and the result is small libraries with very out-of-date holdings. Faculty members routinely tell Chimwaza that the last time they had access to the latest literature was when they did their graduate work abroad.

Jim Haldeman knows something about the difficulties of trying to do scientific research in Africa. Haldeman, a former Peace Corps worker in Ethiopia and currently senior associate director of CALS International Programs, has been trying since the mid-1990s to set up a collaborative project between the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Ethiopian universities. Last year the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) awarded Cornell and three other universities $10 million to build agricultural research and extension services in Amhara, the poorest of Ethiopia's 11 states.

Haldeman chose TEEAL, with its thousands of articles available in full text, to be part of this project because he knows how difficult it is for African scientists to get access to timely research. "When I visited the major agricultural university at Alemaya (a city in Amhara) in 1997 or 1998," Haldeman says, "their most current literature was 1970." A TEEAL set has already been sent to Ethiopia, and two more will soon be delivered as well. One of them may go to Mekelle University in Tigray. 

TEEAL is the brainchild of Wally and Jan Olsen. The Olsens, who traveled through Central and South America in the 1960s and 1970s while working for the National Agricultural Library and the World Bank, realized during these trips that the best way to help poor countries develop was to provide them with access to scholarly information. "Straight hand-outs don't work well," Wally Olsen says. "The solution was to get some scientific and social literature into the hands of Third World scholars."

It wasn't until the late 1980s, when the CD-ROM emerged, that it became feasible to easily and cheaply transfer information to those scholars in developing countries. By this time the Olsens were living in Ithaca; she was director of Mann Library and he was a senior research associate at the library. Wally Olsen imagined marrying the new CD-ROM technology with the contents of core agricultural journals, and he pitched his idea to Bob Herdt ('61), who was then director for agricultural sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1997 the foundation offered Olsen a grant of nearly $1 million to get TEEAL off the ground. Herdt, who has recently retired from Rockefeller and returned to Ithaca as an adjunct CALS faculty member, saw it as an extremely high payoff venture. "This project has the ability to change the quality of research and instruction in developing countries more than almost any other," he said.

With the start-up money and the agreement by journal publishers to waive copyright fees, TEEAL was brought to life as a 44-pound, 172-CD library-in-a-box. The first shipment was delivered in July 1999 to the University of Zimbabwe.

The African regional offices of the Rockefeller Foundation are in Harare, Zimbabwe's capital. It is here, in a modern office building, that Chimwaza and an assistant, who together make up the entire TEEAL African office, share a small space and direct the project's outreach efforts across the continent.

Chimwaza's official title is coordinator of outreach and marketing, which means he travels all over Africa demonstrating TEEAL at agricultural universities and research institutions. In the past four years, he has visited more than 250 research and academic institutions. He visits more than 30 countries a year.

He has little problem exciting people about the product. In East and South Africa, for example, more than 90 percent of the people he talks to have already heard of TEEAL. "And everybody wants it," he says. Currently, there are 50 institutions in Africa with proposals to obtain TEEAL sets and updates.

 

A full subscription to TEEAL costs $20,000-annual updates are $3500- and includes the full text of journals covering a wide range of fields, including nutrition, forestry, agricultural engineering, economics, and crop development. More than 1.8 million pages of journal literature are packed onto several hundred CDs. Because TEEAL runs as a not-for-profit, the literature is offered at a fraction of what it would normally cost-about $700,000 U.S.

Any product offered at 97 percent off its regular price would normally be an easy sell, but this is Africa. In Ethiopia, for example, the gross domestic product per capita is $101. More than 300 million people live on less than $1 a day in Sub-Saharan Africa. By just about any measure, $20,000 is a lot of money to just about every African country.

Countries around the world qualify for TEEAL by having a per capita income low enough that the World Bank lists them as "developing." Few of the qualifying countries in Africa can afford to pay for it on their own, so a lion's share of Chimwaza's workday consists of helping interested governments and universities arrange to get funding to buy TEEAL. "I have to convince donor agencies to fund the sets," he says, "and then I go to the institutions and work with them to put together a proposal."

A majority of the 80-plus TEEAL sets sold around the world have been funded by agencies such as the Rockefeller Foundation, the World Bank, and the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) in the Netherlands. Chimwaza has been very successful in convincing donor agencies that funding TEEAL will help them achieve their development goals. Thanks in large part to his hard work, CTA has purchased five sets in Africa, and the World Bank now allows countries receiving funding to use some of that money to purchase TEEAL.

The results can be seen at the Ghana Agricultural Information Network System, or GAINS, located in the coastal city of Accra, the capital of this former British colony in West Africa. GAINS received its TEEAL set in early 2000 via a grant from CTA, a European Union-funded agency that provides developing countries information for agricultural and rural development.

CTA has become one of the major suppliers of TEEAL sets in Africa, and it chose TEEAL in response to feedback from researchers in Africa about their need for information. "We used to receive on average 500 requests for articles by researchers in Ghana a year," says CTA's Dorothy Mukhebi. "That number has fallen to fewer than 100 since the installation of TEEAL at GAINS."

The results can also be seen at the University of Zimbabwe in Harare, where the first TEEAL set was installed in 1999. Here researchers like Talkmore Mombeyarara have been using TEEAL to investigate ways of improving crop yields by using indigenous species of green manure (decaying plant material). "Farmers need cheaper means to enhance soil fertility," he says, "and this has led to research on the use of green manures in Zimbabwe in the last decade or so. TEEAL was instrumental in carrying out our literature review." This sort of work is particularly important now in a country like Zimbabwe where an estimated 7 million people (half the population) faced starvation in 2003.

The success stories in Ghana and in Zimbabwe are exactly what the Rockefeller Foundation was hoping for when it initially funded TEEAL six years ago. One of the foundation's primary beliefs is that the most effective lever for enhancing food security in developing countries is through new technologies like drought-resistant varieties of rice and sorghum or improved soil nutrient management via green manure or lime. "Appropriate technologies can improve security, but only in the hands of well-trained scientists," says Peter Matlon, the deputy director of food security at Rockefeller. "By providing TEEAL to African scientists, we're improving the efficiency of their ability to address the most pressing needs of the people of Africa."

And Chimwaza wants to get TEEAL into a lot more hands. While plans are currently in the works for an Internet version of TEEAL, many African countries still lack the necessary technological infrastructure to fully make the leap from the desktop to the Web. So for the next several years anyway, Chimwaza will still be working on increasing their access to TEEAL on CD-ROM. Part of this means trying to convince major donor agencies like JICA, from Japan, and GTZ, in Germany, to fund their first TEEAL sets.* "If only they could see what TEEAL has done in Africa," he says with a smile and a shrug. He'd also like to see TEEAL sets in African countries currently without them, like Rwanda and Burundi in Central Africa. Recent conflicts in those countries have simmered down enough that Chimwaza could travel there to demonstrate TEEAL.

Haldeman shares with Chimwaza a cautious optimism about the possibilities for real change in Africa being brought by TEEAL. "Through some good research and collaboration with our colleagues in Ethiopia," he says, "plus what TEEAL brings to the table, we're hoping that we can make a contribution that can be applied elsewhere in the country and possibly around the world.

Anyone interested in learning more about TEEAL, or sponsoring a TEEAL set or annual update at one of the many developing country libraries and research centers seeking funding, is invited to contact the TEEAL Office in Mann Library: teeal@mannlib.cornell.edu, 607-255-7317.
 
- Jim Morris-Knower  

*Photographs courtesy of H. David Thurston, Professor Emeritus, Department of Plant Pathology, Cornell University 
 *In 2003, JICA purchased a TEEAL set. 

AGORA: The Next Generation of TEEAL

In ancient Greece, the agora was the central place of assembly in the middle of the city. The creators of the new Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture (AGORA) hope their online system will serve as a similar, albeit digital, gathering place-in this case, for agricultural scholars in developing countries to gather the latest research in their fields.

A partnership between the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, the Rockefeller Foundation, Mann Library, and major publishers of scientific journals, AGORA provides free Internet access to more than 400 agricultural and life sciences journals for nonprofit organizations in countries with GNP per capita under $1000 (which includes almost all of Africa).

"What's revolutionary about AGORA," says Mary Ochs ('79), TEEAL's project director, "is that for the first time, agricultural researchers in the developing countries will have access to a collection of journals comparable in size to that in the best research libraries in the developed world."

While AGORA will eventually replace TEEAL, which will for now continue to offer updated sets, this was always expected. From the beginning, compact discs were seen as an interim technology, waiting for the Internet to become a viable medium for transmitting scholarly information. But until very recently, the lack of telecommunications infrastructure in most of the developing world meant that the discs were far more practical than the Web. AGORA, the next generation of TEEAL, is set to launch in October 2003.

AGORA is a sister project to the World Health Organization's Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative, or HINARI, which started in 2002 by offering the same sort of extensive online library, but for medical journals. Together, both projects hope to improve food and health security in the developing world by providing timely access to the latest scholarship. And both, of course, owe a great debt to TEEAL for establishing a model that successfully brought together scholars, publishers, and foundations to offer such access.