To help address the challenges of fragmentation in the collection of agricultural data collection, the USAID Bureau for Resilience and Food Security and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s (Gates Foundation) Agricultural Development program are working with the Digital for Resilience and Food Security buy in to the Digital Frontiers project to provide USAID, the Gates Foundation, partners and local stakeholders with a better understanding of different farmer-centric data governance and ownership models, the benefits and limitations of each, and guidance for implementing these models.

Digital Frontiers has released a request for applications (RFA) to conduct this assessment and provide overarching recommendations on how to attain more farmer-centric models of data governance and ownership.

Who Should Apply?

DAI is looking for qualified organizations with:

• Experience in digital technologies relevant to the agriculture sector in developing country contexts
• Regional or country experience in the USAID Feed the Future priority countries and Gates Foundation focus regions
• Prior experience successfully implementing assessments and providing practical guidance and recommendations

As the number of digitally enabled agricultural products and services continues to grow across the globe, most of the data collected by the digital service providers developing these tools remains locked within each entity’s systems. Due to incomplete, fragmented or non-existent data sets on agrifood system stakeholders such as farmers, digital service providers often take on the cost burden of collecting the information they need to develop products and services for their target users. This results in multiple actors holding fragments of information on agrifood system actors, decreasing incentives for data-sharing across organizations. It also increases the burden on food system actors to repeatedly provide their data to numerous researchers, companies and development organizations. This dynamic has led to several missed opportunities for all stakeholders in a given country, including government agencies, the private sector, and the development community, to have a common and complete picture of the state of agricultural communities and the needs of individual actors therein.

Issues of data fragmentation and strategies to address them have been well studied, including through the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID's) Digital Farmer Profiles: Reimagining Smallholder Agriculture study. What is less well-understood is what models exist or could exist to put the subjects of agriculture-related data (i.e., farmers) at the center of governance and ownership while avoiding any further data fragmentation.

More information on qualifications and how to apply can be found in the RFA  and the RFA modification. Applications are due December 1 to [email protected]. If you are interested in receiving updates and further communications regarding this RFA please email [email protected].

 

*This post originally appeared on Digital@DAI.