CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture: Transforming rural livelihoods with the power of information

CGIAR launched the CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture, a new initiative that aims to convene researchers to use big data in order to help improve food security, resilience in the face climate change as well as encouraging rural development. 

Big data are immense stocks of information collected in computers worldwide, and it can be a potential resource for planning and decision-making. Applied to agriculture and rural development it can help give robust responses to some of the most important challenges of our time: climate change, food insecurity and environmental degradation.

For this reason CGIAR partnered with some of the most important international institutions, universities and private companies to create a 6 year platform called Big Data in Agriculture. The platform will have various objectives. First of all, it will help develop and organize data generation, open access, and management for researchers. Secondly the platform will bring together big data practitioners, private sector brands, local companies and universities to encourage interaction and produce innovative new ideas to solve development problems. Finally, the platform will create opportunities for pilot projects that solve core development challenges and help scale them out. 

The platform will collect and analyze vast amounts of data on crops, weather, soils and more by bringing together thousands of experts. It will produce some of the most precise and reliable recommendations that farmers in developing countries have ever had, helping ensure that smallholders enjoy the benefits of the data revolution.

The 15 CGIAR Research Centers and 12 Research Programs are partners in the Platform, alongside 70 external partners ranging international institutions, universities to private companies. They cover public to private, developing to developed country, and analytics to ICT deployment.

CGIAR is a global research partnership for a food-secure future. CGIAR science is dedicated to reducing poverty, enhancing food and nutrition security, and improving natural resources and ecosystem services.

Source: CGIAR