Smallholder farmers are integral to global food security, yet face climate change and often lack actionable real-time data and information. The goal of this project was to share and integrate past, current and future climate, sensor, satellite, farmer-generated, and farm-level data to produce comprehensive datasets and farmer-friendly, dynamic dashboards and visualizations for smallholder farmers. Producers Direct aims to empower farmers with the intelligence needed to make data-driven climate decisions at the farm level, promoting improved sustainable farming practices, increased food, and nutrition security, strengthened resilience, and improved livelihoods and resilience.
This project addressed the following SDGs: SDG 12 - Responsible consumption & production, SDG 13 - Climate action, SDG 15 - Life on land , and SDG 17 - Partnerships for the goals. This project captured and analyzed weather data in Sireet, Kenya and Bushenyi, Uganda at individual farmer levels for the first time ever. It also provided first-time insights into farm health through digital logbooks that were fed back to farmers and producer organizations.
Key achievements included:
Training Lead Farmers on a prototype of a digital record-keeping app, and installation and use of Climate Edge’s Nexo Weather stations.
Development of farmer-friendly training materials and training of Lead Farmers, Smallholders and Youth Agents regarding use and scale-out of digital logbooks.
394 people actively using the logbooks/FarmDirect App and empowered to make climate-smart decisions.
The project’s user-center developer based in Nairobi continues to liaise with a network of Youth Leaders to ensure logbooks are accessible and share relevant data with smallholders.
In 2019, 4126 smallholders were directly trained (indirectly benefiting 16,504 people) in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania on key areas.
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