2 APHLIS was funded through the European Commission’s Joint
Research Centre (JRC) with the technical support of the Natural
Resources Institute (NRI, UK) and Federal Office for Agriculture and
Food (BLE, Germany), in association with the UN FAO, the Association
for Strengthening Agricultural Research in East and Central
Africa (ASARECA), and the Southern Africa Development Community
(SADC). APHLIS estimates PHL by cereal crop, by country, and
by province in East and Southern Africa (but not yet West/Central
Africa). The system went online in March 2009. It combines a PHL
calculator, a database of key information, and a network of local
experts who contribute the latest data and verify loss estimates.
There is decentralized ownership of data by country.
3 The reliability of the calculations made through APHLIS depends
on the quality of PHL assessments available. For some crops or
process steps, assessments were conducted many years ago.
Similarly, under the lack of a standardized methodology for PHL
estimations, many of the surveys available applied methodologies
that make the calculations derived from them not very reliable.