Posts categorized Explainer

This blog post gives an overview on our latest paper on interoperability, implementing interoperable solutions in partnership with public administrations. Based on over 20 years of DG’s experience, the paper demystifies key components needed to build robust, resilient, and interoperable data systems, focusing on the “how” of data standardization, data governance, and implementing technical infrastructure.

In honor of this year’s World Stroke Day, observed annually on October 29th, this piece aims to raise awareness of the substantial burden of non-communicable diseases–particularly stroke incidents–using the case study of Nigeria, one of the main tobacco production hubs on the continent, in addition to Kenya.

While all agriculture has an environmental impact, tobacco is unique in that every stage of the tobacco lifecycle–from the production and consumption of tobacco to farming and disposal of the final product–wreaks havoc on the environment. In this piece, we’ll introduce the lifecycle of producing and using tobacco and explore the requisite environmental impact.

From June 2021 to September 2022, Development Gateway: An IREX Venture’s (DG’s) Visualizing Insights on Fertilizer for African Agriculture (VIFAA) program convened 12 Fertilizer Technical Working Groups in 14 countries which have yielded essential information on Africa’s fertilizer sector, including insights on how geopolitical events have impacted the fertilizer sector and what is needed to mitigate resulting threats to food security throughout Africa.

In the first part of this blog series, we discussed the CALM assessment of the cashew data ecosystem, key findings from the assessment, and how DG is using the findings as well as partner and stakeholder feedback to guide the development of the Cashew-IN platform, a website that will facilitate access to and use of data to improve decision-making for policymakers, farmers, and the private sector. In this blog, we will look at the indicators on the Cashew-IN platform and what the data is telling us about the cashew sector more broadly.

The Cashew-IN program, which DG started in partnership with Cultivating New Frontiers in Agriculture in 2020, conducted a landscape assessment of the data in the cashew sectors of five countries: Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Nigeria. The assessment findings will inform the Cashew-IN platform, a website that the program is developing to facilitate use of data in order to improve decision-making for policymakers, farmers, and the private sector. In this blog (part 1 of 2), we explore the assessment process, findings, and how stakeholders plan to use the platform.

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.

Many factors must be considered before investing in a data ecosystem for sustainable development, including the objective of the assessment, the focus level, and specific goals for data outputs. IREX’s Jesus Melendez Vicente and DG’s Carmen Cañas would like to share a few insights and questions to help you get started, including a curated list of tools for data ecosystem assessments.

Our final episode of "Data… for What!?" about our strategic plan Josh Powell speaks with Fernando Ferrayra and Annie Kilroy about digital transformation, ways to center the user, and our approach to emerging technologies.

Our Visualizing Insights for Fertilizer in African Agriculture (VIFAA) Program launched an Innovation Fund to address data shortages relating to total crop production. Building on its track record of mapping land cover, Quantitative Engineering Design (QED) was selected to tackle the challenge of mapping Nigeria’s croplands. Through the Innovation Fund, DG and partners will use the resulting data and maps to answer two questions: (a) what is the total cropland under production in Nigeria and (b) what is the cropland under production by crop type.