Digital Innovation

Activities

This objective will be achieved through research activities organized around three flagships:

• The Digital Co-Lab, which brings a collection of research, collaboration, and training activities that aim to support our partners to achieve enabling digital innovation in agrifood systems.
• Building Digital Twins for timely decision-making in agrifood systems. A suite of case studies will be developed to incorporate real-time monitoring data into decision-support systems.
• The Digital Inclusion Framework, which will provide a set of metrics on the digital divide in agrifood systems and best practices to promote gender equity in the digital ecosystem.

Engagement

The Digital Innovation Initiative’s focus geographies include Guatemala, Kenya, India, the Limpopo Basin in Southern Africa (including Botswana, South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe) and Rwanda. Additionally, the Initiative undertakes demand-driven digital research for impact activities in Egypt, Bangladesh, and Indonesia.

Outcomes

Proposed 3-year outcomes include:

1. Local digital agrifood ecosystems are strengthened through the Initiative-facilitated open collaborative environment that leads to more than five impact-driven use cases that promote impact-driven inclusive and sustainable impacts.
2. More than three partners revise strategies and business plans to provide gender-responsive and inclusive digital agrifood advisory services that contribute to bridging the digital divide.
3. At least 1,000 people (40% women) improve digital skills to access digital agrifood advisory services that support productive, profitable, and climate-resilient farming and manage climate and market risks.
4. At least two natural resource management organizations improve technical capacities to monitor food, land, and water systems in real time, assess climate risks, and inform stakeholders to equitably allocate water resources.
5. More than five information systems are strengthened by incorporating the Initiative-contributed high-frequency agrifood system monitoring data and analytics to manage climate and market risks.
6. At least six partner organizations boost digital capabilities to utilize real-time data and analytics, analyze underutilized data assets, and generate timely and actionable insights for extension, sustainable development, and accelerated impacts.

Impact

Projected impacts and benefits include:

	CLIMATE ADAPTATION & MITIGATION Improved early warning systems benefit 108,000 people at risk of flooding, avoiding at least 360 lives lost to floods. Food, land and water systems stakeholders access climate forecasts to better manage the risks, adopt climate-smart technologies and management practices and improve their climate adaptive capacity. Policymakers use intersectoral data and food, land and water systems status indicators to negotiate global climate agreements on the adaptation and mitigation planning.
	NUTRITION, HEALTH & FOOD SECURITY Through the adoption of developed data, services and gender-responsive design tools, 6.08 million rural residents in food-production areas with climate hazards are using digital services by 2030, enabling them to detect risks early, make targeted interventions and monitor the effects in real-time to ensure a continued supply of nutritious food and safe water.
	POVERTY REDUCTION, LIVELIHOODS & JOBS Strengthened digital ecosystems with timely, reliable food, land and water systems information allow 6.08 million people to better manage risks, optimize business decisions, create market opportunities, increase income and profitability and improve livelihoods. Digital extension services are strengthened to provide targeted, inclusive advisory information and scale to reach ten times more subscribers, creating more youth employment opportunities.
	GENDER EQUALITY, YOUTH & SOCIAL INCLUSION Bundles of data, services and gender-responsive design tools support innovators to improve the gender-responsiveness of their solutions to better serve the needs of at least 2.43 million women in food, land and water systems, doubling the share of women benefiting from digital advisory and financial services to 40%, from a baseline of 20%. Digital tools empower marginalized groups to voice concerns and influence governance.
	ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH & BIODIVERSITY Timely information on the state of food, land and water systems and embedded biodiversity helps stakeholders assess environmental impacts, such as infrastructure development (natural and built) impacts on surface water availability and deforestation, accounting for environmental costs. Publicizing this information incentivizes food system actors to adopt practices promoting environmental health and biodiversity on at least 8 million hectares.

Projected benefits are a way to illustrate reasonable orders of magnitude for impacts which could arise as a result of the impact pathways set out in the Initiative’s theories of change. In line with the 2030 Research and Innovation Strategy, Initiatives contribute to these impact pathways, along with other partners and stakeholders. CGIAR does not deliver impact alone. These projections therefore estimate plausible levels of impact to which CGIAR, with partners, contribute. They do not estimate CGIAR’s attributable share of the different impact pathways.

Learn more about our partners.

Header photo: A field technician uses Rice Crop Manager, a software developed by IRRI, to get real-time recommendations on his plot. Photo by I. Serrano/IRRI.