Posts focused on Agriculture

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.

DG is pleased to announce the launch of our Digital Agriculture Knowledge Management Library, which is a digital repository of resources detailing digital agriculture best practices. These resources were created as part of our DAS program in order to support individuals and groups across Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia as they advance local and regional agricultural systems through the implementation of digital tools and technologies.

With the aim of improving the efficiency of agriculture data use, Development Gateway: An IREX Venture (DG), Jengalab, and TechChange—with a grant from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)—recently held a learning event, titled “Digital Agriculture: Building the Agricultural Systems of Tomorrow,” in Nairobi, Kenya. Participants identified two key recommendations for advancing digital agriculture in order to increase food security.

In this blog, DGers Ousmane Koné and Andrea Ulrich explore DG's six step “recipe” for effective data use.

As farmers become more reliant on AgTech, they may find that the AgTech providers controlling these technologies (i.e., companies, nonprofits, and governments) are more integrated than ever before, resulting in a few organizations having unprecedented access to and control of farmers’ data. This dynamic results in positive and negative outcomes for farmers. Therefore, farmers face the paradox of using AgTech and adding value to their work, communities, and food systems while giving large amounts of data to AgTech companies that have, at best, limited plans for protecting farmers’ data. In this blog, we identified recommendations and next steps for AgTech providers on how to ensure that their technology benefits smallholder farmers.

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.

Dr. Folarin Okelola from the National Agricultural Seeds Council (NASC) recently sat down with DGer Aminata Camara Badji to discuss the TASAI Dashboard, which was created in partnership with The African Seed Access Index (TASAI) and will help stakeholders assess seed quality, availability, accessibility, and price in 17 countries in Africa.