Posts by Vinisha Bhatia-Murdach

In their second blog exploring Nigeria’s changing fertilizer market, Vinisha Bhatia-Murdach and Scott Wallace dive deep into the details of the NPK fertilizer market and explore how Nigeria became a leader in this space. They also discuss why the VIFAA Nigeria dashboard is an important part of ensuring access to information at each point in fertilizer supply chain.

In the past decade, there has been over $7 billion worth of private-sector investments into Nigeria’s agriculture sector. Why, and what is the impact of these investments? What does it mean for Nigerian farmers? In this blog, we explore these and other changes happening in the Nigerian fertilizer market.

IREX’s Data Compass and Development Gateway’s CALM are methodologies for assessing data ecosystems. While each methodology produces different outputs based on different needs, both prioritize local collaboration and development to produce insights and outputs that reflect local priorities and actionable recommendations that institutions can own and implement.

Since 2017, Development Gateway and partners have been working on the Visualizing Insights on Fertilizer for African Agriculture (VIFAA) Program to support development partners and the private sector to respond to changes in the fertilizer market, ensuring that sufficient quantities and appropriate fertilizers reach farmers at the right time for planting. Recently, DG received funding to expand the program to include four to six additional countries through 2023.

In advance of the first VIFAA country dashboard launch next week, we will explore the importance and source of accurate and reliable data for each of the indicators. This is a crucial step in making data available in a way that stakeholders can use to inform their decisions. 

Finding reliable agriculture data in sub-Saharan Africa is often difficult. If available at all, data is usually fragmented and tucked away in silos within government ministries or closely held by private companies. It is also significantly delayed or in a format that makes analysis difficult. For stakeholders who need information for decision making, a lack of reliable data is a significant barrier. The Visualizing Insights on Fertilizer for African Agriculture (VIFAA) program is working towards making fertilizer-related data, a key subset of agriculture data, more accessible to stakeholders for decision making.

If an organization with an existing culture of learning and adaptation gets lucky, and an innovative funding opportunity appears, the result can be a perfect storm for changing everything. The Results Data Initiative was that perfect storm for DG. RDI confirmed that simply building technology and supplying data is not enough to ensure data is actually used. It also allowed us to test our assumptions and develop new solutions, methodologies & approaches to more effectively implement our work.

What does it take to design a platform to collect, manage, and analyze a country’s agricultural information? Ideally, a significant amount of time to speak with key data producers and intended data users to understand needs and achieve buy-in. But, as was our experience in Malawi, – it also requires a fair amount of humility and iteration.

Agriculture data being reported, collected, and visualized is growing exponentially. But are the data we’re spending so much to collect truly relevant for decision makers? We’re proud to announce that, through our Results Data Initiative (RDI), we’re working with Malawi’s Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Water Development (MOAIWD) to design a National Agriculture Management Information System (NAMIS).

This post builds upon a DG contribution to the 2017 OECD Development Cooperation Report, launched on October 17, 2017. All too often, discussions about managing for results in development fail to specify who is managing, what decisions they are authorized to make, or what results data are being used. Identifying the who and whats is