Thursday 5 April, 4pm CEST
Duration: 1 hour, with 15 minutes for questions

Webinar held. Recording available here: https://youtu.be/rRnoi-2YBlQ.

As part of our work on farmers’ rights to data and following up on the face-to-face course on Farmers’ Access to Data organized in Centurion in November 2017, GFAR continues its collaboration with the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition initiative (GODAN) and the Technical Center for Agricultural and Rural Cooperarion (CTA) on a series of webinars on data-driven agriculture, its opportunities and its challenges.

This webinar is offered by CTA.

Presenters: Chris Addison, Senior Programme Coordinator, CTA; and Chipo Msengezi, Project Coordinator, CTA.

Data-driven services and products are coming to be seen as promising mechanisms that farmer organizations – cooperatives, associations, enterprises, etc. – can use to better serve the interests of their members. Data-driven services can be used for improved production, trade and market access or finance, among other uses on the value chain. This data can be in numerous forms – collected from the farmer, for the farmer, open or closed.

Farmer-representing organizations offer great opportunity to safeguard smallholder data, maximize returns in value chains, and best exploit the potential of third-party services and data offerings . This all relies heavily on efficient farmer profiling activities which will allow the farmer organizations to connect better with their members and deal with third party service provide.

About the presenters

Chris Addison is Senior Programme Coordinator for Data4Ag at CTA. The Data for Agriculture (Data4Ag) project focuses on data use to benefit smallholder farmers. Chris has worked in the ICT and knowledge management (KM) for development sector for the last 18 years and as director of the nonprofit One World Europe. He contributed to the OpenAire Open Data report as joint author of the Agriculture chapter. Whilst at IFPRI, he commissioned the conversion of the Global Hunger Index data to linked open data and is currently working on a project to publish the CTA archive as a linked open dataset.

Chipo Msengezi is Project Coordinator at CTA. She is responsible for the coordination of capacity development activities within the GODAN Action Project, which aims to strengthen data users, producers and intermediaries to engage effectively with open data and maximise its potential for impact in the agriculture. Chipo has worked in the ICT and knowledge management (KM) for development sector for over nine years conducting programmes in Sub-Saharan Africa to enhance capacity amongst the research and education communities in the latest information tools and advocate for the adoption of new technologies that drive development in Africa.