The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) are organising Digital Agriculture Solutions Forum (DASF) for Asia and the Pacific 2020 (formally called E-agriculture Solutions Forum) that will be held virtually from 30 November – 2 December 2020. Register here to attend The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted several opportunities where digital technologies can help various stakeholders. In particular, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, distributed ledger technologies (DLTs), mobile applications...
Session Name: Connecting youth-led digital innovations to FAO and Partners’ Programmes in Africa Date: Monday, 07 September 2020 Time: 11:00 – 13:00 pm Venue: Virtual AGRF Channel Moderated by : Dickson Mbando Naftali, Head of Generation Africa Context: FAO and its patners seek to create a “Digital...
Rome - On Wednesday the 29th July 2020, the 9th Session of FAO’s Digital Innovation Dialogue on Youth Digital Solution for Food and Agriculture showcased the synergies between FAO and UNDP Global Centre in Singapore’s work to build an enabling ecosystem and innovation culture for youth agripreneurs to harness digital solutions for food and agriculture. This was the first of more collaborations to come, the dialogue gathered colleagues from the UNDP Global Centre in Singapore and selected finalists of their global agritech programme, Cultiv@te , together with FAO’s selected innovation...
The African Green Revolution Forum is underway in Accra, Ghana and the FAO E-Agriculture team is participating and facilitated a parallel session on Establishing the International Digital Council for Food and Agriculture, on the 3rd of September and the FAO CIO director also spoke on the Panel Discussion on Evidence-Based Leadership and Data Systems on Tuesday, 3 September from 14:30 – 16:30 On the 4th of September, FAO team is invited to attend and participate to the Digital Agriculture Knowledge Sharing side event, which will see practitioners such as CTA, Dalberg, GSMA, MaMo Panel and...
FAO Regional Office for Europe and Central Asia has launched a call on digital innovations for agriculture in that region. The call aims at collecting lessons learned and recommendations for the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) or digital innovations in the sectors of agriculture, livestock, fisheries, forestry or rural development. Selected innovations will be disseminated on online platforms, social media and will be part of an online FAO publication on the use of digital technologies for agriculture in Europe and Central Asia. Topic The innovations you wish to...
By Günther Feiler , Capacity Development Officer, FAO Rome, and Thomas Muenzel , Investment Support Officer, FAO Bangkok ( The article was originally published by the ICTworks and we reproduce for our community. All rights acknowledged) Experience has shown that substantial public investments in agricultural production, transport and storage infrastructure, combined with private on-farm investment are essential for promoting pro-poor economic growth, bringing people out of poverty and ending food insecurity and malnutrition. The FAO State of Food and Agriculture Report in 2012 found that the...
In sub-Saharan Africa, smallholder farmers are vulnerable to risks associated with changing weather patterns. In Uganda, the SUM-Africa project provides satellite based drought Index Insurance to protect farmers. The SUM-Africa project is supported by the G4AW program of Netherlands Space Office (NSO) and recently a Dutch Company (EARS) signed a long term contract with Uganda Agro Insurance Consortium (AIC) to continue this service. What are agricultural index insurance? Agricultural index insurance products are linked to an index, such as temperature, rainfall, crop yield or...
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) have recently published a title called, ‘ Blockchain for Agriculture, Opportunities and Challenges ’ as part of the E-Agriculture in Action series publications. This is part of the collaboration of working together of the two UN Agencies to work together to promote the use of sustainable information and communication technologies (ICTs) in agriculture. The focus of the publication is on blockchain technology in agriculture. The aim of the book is to demystify the technology,...
Blockchain or distributed ledger technologies are relatively new technologies and have been adopted in a number of sectors. The recent ICT update explains what blockchains are and their applications in agriculture. The most appealing aspect of this technology is its focus on trust, transparency of transactions, immutability and incorruptibility of transactions, low operating and transactional costs and distributed governance in a large network. In light of these reasons, one of the article cites the following applications in agriculture Value Chain Blockchains can allow consumers to track and...
An audio-visual podcast by MicroSave provides an insight into how Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and drone technology have a potential to improve access to finance for smallholder farmers in East Africa. MicroSave is an international financial inclusion consulting firm operating in eleven offices across Asia and Africa. While strengthening the capacity of local institutions, the firm designs and implement market-led solutions for financial services and most importantly designs a variety of financial inclusion models. In the above referred podcast entitled, “ Drones...
Session Name: Connecting youth-led digital innovations to FAO and Partners’ Programmes in Africa Date: Monday, 07 September 2020 Time: 11:00 – 13:00 pm Venue: Virtual AGRF Channel Moderated by : Dickson Mbando Naftali, Head of Generation Africa Context: FAO and its patners seek to create a “Digital...
