Digital technology has enormous potential to improve food security in Feed the Future countries and around the world. There are four broad categories of digital tools used in agriculture programs:
Different categories of digital tools should not be taken alone, but rather as aspects that reinforce the others’ effectiveness. Better and higher quality data enables precision agriculture and extension services, allowing for digital financial services.
These tools work in concert across the value chain translates into tangible improvements in food security for vulnerable populations.
Submit your ICTforAg session ideas now to showcase your insights on how to use digital tools for better agricultural outcomes at ICTforAg 2018. Submission Deadline is this Friday!
Digital Tools in USAID Agricultural Programming Toolkit
The purpose of the Digital Tools in USAID Agricultural Programming Toolkit, created by the Digital Development for Feed the Future (D2FTF) team, is to demonstrate the importance of digital tools in agriculture. It contains:
- Digital tools currently used by USAID Missions and implementers
- Resources for those attempting to implement digital tools
This toolkit also includes work planning and procurement considerations, including how to encourage implementing partners to explore digital tools and when prizes and challenges can crowdsource innovative solutions to well-defined development problems.
Digital Tools for Agricultural Insurance Access Toolkit
Digital infrastructure and tools are expanding access to affordable and relevant financial services, such as insurance, to rural areas for the first time. Yet, guidance on insurance products, especially how to use newly available digital tools to increase reach and adoption, remains limited.
The Using Digital Tools to Expand Access to Agricultural Insurance guide, developed under mSTAR, aims to support integration of digital tools and interventions that promote access to agricultural insurance to develop an inclusive insurance market that meets the needs of households and enterprises at all income levels.
Research has shown that insurance can be a valuable tool for helping a household to increase their resilience to shocks and the predictability of insurance payouts helps manage risk and has the benefit of encouraging households to investment in more productive inputs that lead to higher incomes.
Do you have research on other digital tools in agriculture? Submit your ICTforAg session ideas now to showcase your insights at ICTforAg 2018. Submission Deadline is this Friday!
Would be very interesting if the data which gets collecting from the field over the yield and from the farmers is fed into AI Driven software for better outputs and for guessing the best probabilities of upcoming issues regarding the crop. And also suggestions after considering various data of soil samples, previous yield quality and thus considering which crop to be grown would be awesome.