The Yarmouk Agricultural Resource Development Project of the Ministry of Agriculture in Jordan implements its activities for the sake of enhancing and developing agricultural resource base in the Yarmouk valley through technical assistance and financial support of the targeted farmers in the project area. The project is one of the founders of the Knowledge Access in Rural Interconnected Areas Network (KariaNet), whose main purpose is to enhance the use of ICTs among its members for the sake of knowledge sharing and information/experience exchange between its members. The Design Document of KariaNet made it clear that it is important to include – on a pilot and experimental basis at least – the rural communities targeted by the member projects in the activities the network implements. In this perspective, KariaNet strategy included the setup of a pilot mechanism in one of the rural communities, sponsored by a meber project, in order to enhance its capacities in terms of ICT use. For this, a competition was organised between the member projects and Yarmouk Project from Jordan was selected to implement a Community Pilot ICT Center in one of its beneficiary rural communities, i.e. Hartha community in Beni Kenana District.

The overall objective of this pilot project is to contribute to the improvement of living and income of Hartha community members through their access to useful information and benefit from others’ experiences. Meanwhile, its purpose is to strengthen the capacity of Hartha community members in using ICTs in order to participate in KariaNet activities aiming at sharing and disseminating useful information, experiences, and knowledge, and enhance dialogue between all community stakeholders.

In order to achieve its planned objectives, Hartha ICT Community Pilot Project will be implemented on the basis of the following components:

• Component 1 - Enhancement of the Information management system and the capacity of ICT use at the community level;
• Component 2 - Improvement of knowledge and information access;
• Component 3 - Development of content and capacity of documentation and sharing.