Posts by Beverley Hatcher-Mbu

DG's joint session at 2023 Festival de Datos posed the question: What does a “good” agriculture data system look like? In this blog post, we'll delve into the key principles that emerged from the discussion.

Development Gateway: An IREX Venture (DG) hosted a discussion titled "Transforming Food Systems: The Power of Interoperability and Partnerships" at both Africa Food Systems Forum (AGRF) 2023 and the recently concluded ICT4Ag conference. Discussions from these critical events revolved around key themes crucial to DG’s ongoing work, including connecting people, institutions, partners, and systems when we think about technology working at scale to transform agriculture. In this blog, we explore three key takeaways from these conversations.

The Digital Advisory Support Services for Accelerated Rural Transformation (DAS) Program launched in March 2022 and will go through March 2025. Development Gateway: an IREX Venture (DG) will implement the grant in partnership with Jengalab and TechChange to advance Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) in the agricultural sector across Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia.

Data governance frameworks are essential as data and technology continue to become increasingly central to how governments, institutions, groups, and individuals all interact with one another and among themselves. Here are the best practices DG has learned in creating data governance frameworks so far.

Our work is at the intersection of open data, technological development, and strategic advising to improve data use. We see growing questions about how we as a global community manage, share, reuse, and store data that is integral to our existing and future work. This blog is the start of a conversation we want to have.

In place of unwieldy spreadsheets and dozens of sources, the VIFAA Fertilizer Dashboard introduces a “one-stop-shop” for trustworthy, visually appealing information that is key to understanding Nigeria’s fertilizer sector.

We are thrilled to announce that the Visualizing Insights for African Agriculture (VIFAA) Kenya Fertilizer Dashboard is now live! From fertilizer price to consumption, this dashboard makes Kenya’s fertilizer data easier to access, use, and share for national and county level decision making

“Knowledge sharing” is an undeniable buzzword in the international development space. However, the idea behind it is both simple and effective: by sharing similar experiences and learning from one another, teams can develop practical solutions to challenges. Often, they also discover their challenges are not unique – across DG’s global Aid Management Platform (AMP) network, our experience highlights how AMP country challenges and goals are often aligned.

With support from the Open Societies Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA), Development Gateway (DG) began conducting studies in July 2018 in Senegal, Guinea, and Nigeria to map data needs, availability, and use in the extractives sector. Last week at the EITI Global Conference in Paris, France, we shared key takeaways and findings on EI data needs in the session Leveraging Information Technology in EITI Mainstreaming. Today, we're sharing more details from our presentation and how takeaways are building into our EI data work in West Africa.

When someone mentions artificial intelligence (AI), it’s easy to conjure up two conflicting images: the first, killer robots whizzing past, replacing human jobs, daily tasks, and social interactions in a post-apocalyptic world; the second, a C-3PO-esque personality revolutionizing our health and food systems. Pondering this, we are also inclined to explore the question, where does