WHAT WE DO

Agriculture

Growing Digital Agriculture Excellence
to Enhance Food Security

Global food insecurity is on the rise, driven by factors such as conflict and climate shocks. This is especially a priority in rapidly growing regions like sub-Saharan Africa. From fertilizer, soil health, livestock, and seeds, to national digital roadmaps and diagnostics, DG’s ability to match our tested methods with deep existing technical expertise has paved the way for rapid growth in the agriculture sector. We harness data to help decision-makers understand agricultural, economic, and market systems, enabling timely, targeted support for farmers.

We take a ‘whole of agriculture’ approach, looking across crops, animals, and inputs to move beyond individual value chains toward integrated, interoperable systems. Together with partners, we build tools that support information sharing, streamline processes, and ensure data quality and long-term sustainability. These interoperable data systems, cutting across private and public partners, are vital for harnessing AI and large-scale digital transformation.

FEATURED PROGRAMS

The Soil Nutrient Roadmap

The Soil Nutrient Roadmap (SNR) helps governments translate soil health targets into costed, sequenced national plans, informing country soil health strategies and investment plans in West and East Africa. The SNR is working with relevant stakeholders to address fragmented soil data landscapes by providing a practical, transparent, and scalable framework that translates soil and agronomic data into actionable insights.
a Livestock Information Vision Ethiopia (aLIVE) Program
The aLIVE program is developing an interoperable Livestock Information System that connects data across institutions, enabling better decisions on animal health, production, and trade. The overall goal of aLIVE is to support Ethiopia in meeting national food demands as well as achieving food security while building a more robust, independent economy.
Digital Advisory Support Services for Accelerated Rural Transformation (DAS) Program
The DAS Program seeks to advance food security across Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia by advancing access to and use of technological solutions that support smallholder farmers. Overall, the DAS Program identifies opportunities to pilot, scale, and implement digital solutions across agricultural programs.
Visualizing Insights on Fertilizer for African Agriculture (VIFAA)

Visualizing Insights on Fertilizer for African Agriculture (VIFAA) is designed to provide vital fertilizer data and information to governments, civil society organizations, and private sector players across Sub-Saharan Africa. VIFAA was designed to holistically address the supply, demand, and use of fertilizer data at both country and regional levels. To support this, DG designed dashboards that provide insight on sector performance for decision-makers in Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, and Ethiopia.

Data Interoperability and Governance (DIG)

To strengthen data use in agriculture, the Data Interoperability and Governance (DIG) program collaborates with the 50×2030 initiative to lead data use efforts in Senegal by strengthening the interoperability of administrative and survey datasets, and developing tools and governance mechanisms that enable the use of data for evidence-based policymaking.

Farmer Centric Data Governance

To empower farmers with more control over their data, DG conducted a study to move beyond theory and explore the practical implementation of agricultural data governance practices in low- and middle-income countries. The Report, six Deep Dives, and nine Case Studies provide user-centric approaches to data governance that places farmers and their communities at the center of data gathering initiatives and aims to reduce the negative effects of centralized power.
Cashew-IN

As part of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s Food for Progress PRO-Cashew project for West Africa, DG collaborated with Cultivating New Frontiers in Agriculture (CNFA) to develop a data collection and analysis platform. This platform enhanced cashew productivity and competitiveness by supporting informed decision-making across the value chain in Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Nigeria.

The African Seed Access Index
In 2019, The African Seed Access Index (TASAI) and DG launched a partnership with the aim of helping decision-makers, the public sector, development partners, private sector businesses, and farmers visualize and use data to support a fully functional formal seed system. Through this program, DG integrated digital survey tools into TASAI’s data collection and validation process to more efficiently visualize seed data in a publically accessible dashboard, granting stakeholders access to high quality data on seed quality, availability, accessibility, and price in 16 countries in Africa.