Article by Basma Albanna, Andreas Pawelke and Hodan Abdullahi: “In every community, some individuals or groups achieve significantly better outcomes than their peers, despite having similar challenges and resources. Finding these so-called positive deviants and working with them to diffuse their practices is referred to as the Positive Deviance approach. The Data-Powered Positive Deviance (DPPD) method follows the same logic as the Positive Deviance approach but leverages existing, non-traditional data sources, in conjunction with traditional data sources to identify and scale the solutions of positive deviants. The UNDP Somalia Accelerator Lab was part of the first cohort of teams... (More >)
Bridging Digital Divides: How PescaData is Connecting Small-Scale Fishing Cooperatives to the Blue Economy
Article by Stuart Fulton: “In this research project, we examine how digital platforms – specifically PescaData – can be leveraged to connect small-scale fishing cooperatives with impact investors and donors, creating new pathways for sustainable blue economy financing, while simultaneously ensuring fair data practices that respect data sovereignty and traditional ecological knowledge. PescaData emerged as a pioneering digital platform that enables fishing communities to collect more accurate data to ensure sustainable fisheries. Since then, PescaData has evolved to provide software as a service to fishing cooperatives and to allow fishers to document their solutions to environmental and economic challenges.... (More >)
Farmers Sue Over Deletion of Climate Data From Government Websites
Article by Karen Zraick: “Organic farmers and environmental groups sued the Agriculture Department on Monday over its scrubbing of references to climate change from its website. The department had ordered staff to take down pages focused on climate change on Jan. 30, according to the suit, which was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Within hours, it said, information started disappearing. That included websites containing data sets, interactive tools and funding information that farmers and researchers relied on for planning and adaptation projects, according to the lawsuit. At the same time,... (More >)
Rethinking the Measurement of Resilience for
Food and Nutrition Security
Paper by John M. Ulimwengu: “This paper presents a novel framework for assessing resilience in food systems, focusing on three dynamic metrics: return time, magnitude of deviation, and recovery rate. Traditional resilience measures have often relied on static and composite indicators, creating gaps in understanding the complex responses of food systems to shocks. This framework addresses these gaps, providing a more nuanced assessment of resilience in agrifood sectors. It highlights how integrating dynamic metrics enables policymakers to design tailored, sector-specific interventions that enhance resilience. Recognizing the data intensity required for these metrics, the paper indicates how emerging satellite imagery... (More >)
Inside the New Nonprofit AI Initiatives Seeking to Aid Teachers and Farmers in Rural Africa
Article by Andrew R. Chow: “Over the past year, rural farmers in Malawi have been seeking advice about their crops and animals from a generative AI chatbot. These farmers ask questions in Chichewa, their native tongue, and the app, Ulangizi, responds in kind, using conversational language based on information taken from the government’s agricultural manual. “In the past we could wait for days for agriculture extension workers to come and address whatever problems we had on our farms,” Maron Galeta, a Malawian farmer, told Bloomberg. “Just a touch of a button we have all the information we need.” The... (More >)
The paradox of climate data in West Africa: growing urgency coupled with diminishing accessibility
Cirad: “In 2022, a prolonged drought devastated maize crops in northern Burkina Faso, leaving two million people without sufficient food resources. This dramatic situation could have been better anticipated and its impacts could have been mitigated with the collection and equitable sharing of specific data: that of agrometeorology, the science that studies the effects of meteorological, climatological and hydrological factors on crops. Although it is too late to prevent the 2022 drought, protecting people from future droughts remains an urgent priority, especially in Africa, a continent where climate change poses a serious threat to rainfed agriculture, its main agricultural... (More >)
The future of agricultural data-sharing policy in Europe: stakeholder insights on the EU Code of Conduct
Paper by Mark Ryan, Can Atik, Kelly Rijswijk, Marc-Jeroen Bogaardt, Eva Maes & Ella Deroo: “n 2018, the EU Code of Conduct of Agricultural Data Sharing by Contractual Agreement (EUCC) was published. This voluntary initiative is considered a basis for rights and responsibilities for data sharing in the agri-food sector, with a specific farmer orientation. While the involved industry associations agreed on its content, there are limited insights into how and to what extent the EUCC has been received and implemented within the sector. In 2024, the Data Act was introduced, a horizontal legal framework that aims to enforce... (More >)
How Open-Source Software Empowers Nonprofits And The Global Communities They Serve
Article by Steve Francis: “One particular area where this challenge is evident is climate. Thousands of nonprofits strive to address the effects of a changing climate and its impact on communities worldwide. Headlines often go to big organizations doing high-profile work (planting trees, for instance) in well-known places. Money goes to large-scale commercial agriculture or new technologies — because that’s where profits are most easily made. But thousands of other communities of small farmers that aren’t as visible or profitable need help too. These communities come together to tackle a number of interrelated problems: climate, soil health and productivity,... (More >)
This Chatbot Democratizes Data to Empower India’s Farmers
Article by Abha Malpani Naismith: “…The lack of access to market price information and reliance on intermediaries to sell on their behalf leaves farmers vulnerable to price exploitation and uncertain returns on their investments. To solve this, Gramhal is building a data cooperative in India where farmers contribute their information to a data ecosystem, which all farmers can leverage for better informed decision-making… The social enterprise started the project to democratize data first by using the Indian government’s collected data sets from markets and crops across the country. It then built a chatbot (called Bolbhav) and plugged in that... (More >)
When Farmland Becomes the Front Line, Satellite Data and Analysis Can Fight Hunger
Article by Inbal Becker-Reshef and Mary Mitkish: “When a shock to the global food system occurs—such as during the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022—collecting the usual ground-based data is all but impossible. The Russia–Ukraine war has turned farmland into the front lines of a war zone. In this situation, it is unreasonable to expect civilians to walk onto fields riddled with land mines and damaged by craters to collect information on what has been planted, where it was planted, and if it could be harvested. The inherent danger of ground-based data collection, especially in occupied territories of the... (More >)
