Vision

The creation of a 'one-stop' house for the timeous and effective collection and dissemination of all information and data on Swaziland's Agricultural Developments.

 Mission Statement

 It is to ensure household food security and increased sustainable agricultural productivity through the provision of appropriate information dissemination, efficient and effective outreach support of all relevant stakeholders, while providing comprehensive information on agriculture.

 Mandate

The mandate of the section is to procure, process, package and to disseminate information that supports the other Ministry's departments and sections efforts in ensuring household food security and sustainable agricultural productivity. The sections support to the entire ministry incudes the collection, storage and provision of other relevant data and information to all other stakeholders. The mandate includes the responsibility of updating and managing agricultural databases with a view to providing timely and reliable statistics/ information on food and agriculture for policy formulation, strategic planning, decision making, and research purposes.

Operations and Programmes

Printing of publications of technical manuals —The Section has to procure manuscripts from the agricultural researchers and National Subject Matter Specialist which are processed into written manuals for use by both extension staff and farmers.

 Production of broadcast radio programmes – The Section has to interview farmers about their technical needs and then solicit corresponding answers from technicians to be used in the production of broadcast radio programmes.

 Provision of libraries services – The Section operates a host of libraries and Reading Centres in the Rural Development Areas (RDAs) for use by both farmers and community dwellers to acquire agricultural information.

 Administration of a website – the Section has to post both technical and publicity information on the Ministry’s WebPages on regular basis.  

Provision of general publicity – the Section has to attend all ministerial functions to provide public address systems and news coverage that is used for publicity purposes to promote and propagate the Ministry’s image and activities.

 Provision of computer services – the Section has to provide repairs to the Ministry’s host of computers as well as maintain the local area network.

 Provision of multi-media agricultural training programmes – the Section is in the process of producing home videos (to be packaged as VCDs and DVDs) on agricultural method demonstration to assist operators such as tractor owners on step-by-step ways of maintaining and servicing their machinery and farmers on how to go about (step-by-step) undertaking certain operations such as pruning of fruit trees; etc..