Posts focused on Agriculture

Cashew-IN project came to an end in August 2024 after four years of working with government agencies, producers, traders, processors, and development partners in the five implementing countries to co-create an online tool aimed to inform, support, promote, and strengthen Africa’s cashew industry. This blog outlines some of the key project highlights, including some of the challenges we faced, lessons learned, success stories, and identified opportunities for a more competitive cashew sector in West Africa.

For over a decade, Development Gateway: An IREX Venture (DG) has been at the forefront of digital agriculture, leveraging agricultural data to support input monitoring, value chain analysis, and farmer-centric governance models. With funding from the Gates Foundation, DG is launching the Soil Nutrient Roadmap (SNR), a cutting-edge initiative using geospatial data to estimate current and future soil and crop nutrient requirements.

In today’s fast-evolving world, governments and public organizations are under more pressure than ever before to deliver efficient, transparent services that align with public expectations. In this blog, we delve into the key concepts behind digital transformation and how it can enhance public value by promoting transparency, informing policy, and supporting evidence-based decision-making.

Over the last six years, DG, together with its partners AfricaFertilizer (AFO) and Wallace & Associates, collaborated to implement the Visualizing Insights on Fertilizer for African Agriculture (VIFAA) Program. In the program’s final year (2024), the team undertook a “program learning process” to reflect on outcomes, challenges, and successes through internal interviews. This blog captures five key learnings, which we hope will guide similar programs aiming to bridge data gaps in agricultural development.

Ethiopia has the largest livestock population in Africa, with over 70 million cattle, 95 million sheep and goats, and 8 million camels as of 2024, according to The World Bank. To support the effective management of this vast sector, Development Gateway (DG), through the aLIVE program, is working to enhance key livestock information systems for Ethiopia’s Ministry of Agriculture (MoA). 

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.

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.

After eighteen months of implementing the aLIVE program, we’ve learned three lessons on how to best support our partners in Ethiopia, advance our work in data systems and management, and ultimately, reach our overall goal of supporting Ethiopia in achieving food security and building a more robust, independent economy.

Through DG’s Visualizing Insights on Fertilizer for African Agriculture (VIFAA) program, we recently published a case study titled “Fostering Sustainable Agriculture through Data-Driven Collaboration and Partnership: Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Nigeria.” It dives deep into how the VIFAA program has impacted the fertilizer data and markets in Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Nigeria. In this blog, we explore the overall impact that the VIFAA program is making, why the program was needed, and offer some key highlights from the case study.

In early 2024, the "a Livestock Information Vision Ethiopia" (aLIVE) governing committee endorsed a comprehensive set of standards to guide the collection, storage, and maintenance of livestock data in Ethiopia (i.e., a data standard). The data standard specifically focuses on standardizing data on cattle, sheep, goats, and camels in the country. The National Livestock Data Standard document contains standardized data sets for national animal data recording, animal disease, diagnosis, treatment, vaccination recording, animal events recording, location, and other additional attributes.