Hand-In-Hand Geospatial Platform
World Food Day 2022: FAO call to action includes Hand-in-Hand Initiative and Geospatial Platform
World Food Day celebrations kicked off in Rome on 14 October 2022 with many FAO-led and co-organized events to raise awareness around the deteriorating global food security crisis, worsened the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hybrid events will continue to take center stage in the coming week, with the second edition of the events for World Food Forum, which includes the following:
This year, the aim is to foster dialogue and debate among relevant stakeholders, including young people, farmers, small-scale producers, Indigenous Peoples, policymakers, agri-investors and scientists, who will be tuning in from the four corners of the world with one common goal: to move the needle of food security to achieve a better food future for all, leaving no one behind.
Central to the discussions in the days and events around this year’s World Food Day 2022 is the need to strengthen data-driven agricultural interventions and decision-making, including making training, finance, innovation and technologies more accessible to vulnerable communities who are often hit the hardest.
The impact of data-driven technologies and interventions to transform agrifood systems and ensure no one is left behind was emphasized this year in several events, in particular the Science and Innovation Forum Side Event in the afternoon on World Food Day: “Agro-Informatics: Actionable data for farmers and decision makers”.
The event presented the applications and impact of digital tools in the field and how data and technology provide tools to enable policy makers, extension workers, and farmers with digital solutions to real-world challenges. The Hand-in-Hand Geospatial Platform was just one of the many existing examples of how more accurate, integrated multidimensional data contributes to accelerating FAO’s strategic objectives towards improved sustainable agriculture and early warning systems. See here for more on Digitalization events at FAO this week.
Hand-in-Hand Initiative and Geospatial Platform central to World Food Day 2022
Leaving no one behind means working on many fronts at the same time. For FAO, this includes the Hand-in-Hand initiative, enabled by the HiH Geospatial Platform, designed to accelerate agrifood systems’ transformations by eradicating poverty (SDG1), ending hunger and malnutrition (SDG2), reducing inequalities (SDG10), promoting decent rural employment and services, fostering gender equality, ensuring social protection, ending child labour, supporting local food production for vulnerable populations in food crisis countries, and supporting rural and Indigenous Peoples, who are the custodians of much of the earth’s biodiversity.
How the Hand-in-Hand Initiative works
Hand-in-Hand is a flagship FAO initiative designed to remove these barriers to agricultural development. It provides the support and data needed to enable governments, donors and the private sector to more precisely target agricultural investments and policies for resilient, sustainable and productive agrifood systems. In this way, Hand-in-Hand supports the acceleration of agricultural transformation and sustainable rural development to eradicate poverty (SDG1), end hunger and malnutrition (SDG2) and reduce inequalities (SDG10). The initiative prioritizes countries and territories where poverty and hunger are highest, national capacities are limited, or operational difficulties are greatest due to natural or human crises.
FAO's Geospatial Platform for data-driven decision making
The award-winning HiH Geospatial Platform is the enabling tool for the Hand-in-Hand Initiative: a comprehensive, open-access database of validated geospatial, biophysical and socioeconomic data covering 245 countries and territories from 1961 to the present day. With millions of data layers, as well as advanced modelling and analytics functionality, the Geospatial Platform serves as Hand-in-Hand’s key enabling tool – allowing governments, donors and the private sector to identify territories where agricultural investment has the greatest potential to alleviate poverty and hunger.
The data has been sourced from FAO and other leading public data providers across the UN and NGOs, academia, private sector and space agencies. It also incorporates FAOSTAT data on food and agriculture for over 245 countries and territories from 1961 to the most recent year available. Since the launch of the HiH Geospatial Platform in 2020 over 65 countries and institutions have participated in workshops to learn how leveraging data and technology can contribute to digital agriculture transformation and rural development.
“Geospatial technologies and agricultural data represent an opportunity to find new ways of reducing hunger and poverty through more accessible and integrated data- driven solutions”, said Dejan Jakovljevic, head of FAO’s Digitalization and Informatics Division.
The platform has been developed to serve geospatial data experts and non-technical users to platform to produce data maps or create compelling impact stories. From remote-sensed geospatial data to statistical time series, the data visualization tool enables the analysis of public and private agricultural-related data at global, regional, national and subnational levels.
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- Read the full article on World Food Day 2022 at FAO here.
- Learn about World Food Day 2022 here.
- About the Hand-in-Hand Geospatial Platform.
