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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - NADiRA (Nurturing Africa Digital Revolution for Agriculture)

Teaser

Summary

Started in November 2017, NADiRA â€“ Nurturing Africaâ€™s Digital Revolution for Agriculture - is an innovation action to develop the use of Earth Observation (EO) in contractual smallholder agriculture, improving risk management, efficiency, productivity, financial security and inclusive welfare benefits for all value chain stakeholders.
Africa is undergoing a transformative change, driven by youth, urbanization and information technology. This social and economic revolution harbors massive pent-up demand for sustainable digital solutions to realize Africaâ€™s potential for quality food, feed, fuel, pharmaceutical production, for domestic consumption and export on world markets. NADiRA harnesses recent improvements in the resolutions, density, continuity and inter-calibration of EO missions to mainstream the use of COPERNICUS, other EO products and IoT technologies inside advanced digital value chains heralded by the agCelerant agricultural business orchestrator.
The NADiRA project, within the scope of the H2020 action, has five major objectives.
1. Develop and integrate EO and IoT data sources into agCelerant in order to achieve operational cost reductions in the market profiling and qualification, credit and insurance products and assessment of the volume and quality of the farm production.
2. Demonstrate the commercial and financial viability of the EO enhanced agCelerant offer with 4 large scale pilots, operated during 2 crop seasons and targeting 4 types of crops (rice, maize, peanut and sorghum), several production systems and agricultural management practices.
3. Tune the business model as conceived and implemented in the agCelerant platform for fitness-for-purpose and robustness by industrializing the EO-derived services and their delivery as well as implementing the feedback loops based on collected field data.
4. Develop the business plan and commercialization roadmap to become with agCelerant the leader of the digital orchestration of the smallholders value chain in contractual agriculture in Africa.
5. Disseminate the results of NADiRA, coupled with agCelerant, and commercialize its outcome in Africa, Europe and Asia, by activating the channels of the business partners such as Swiss Re, leveraging the ICRISAT/CGIAR network in Africa and Asia, the EUGENIUS network in Europe and mobilizing the EU and Member States cooperation organizations.

Work performed

The NADiRA consortium developed the processing chains required for satellite augmented detection of plot-level agronomic practices (e.g. plowing, flooding, harvesting), monitoring of crop response, and â€“ with the support of novel, low-cost IoT sensor networks and multi-model simulations â€“ crop yield forecasting. Corresponding workflows were connected into MANOBIâ€™s agCelerantâ„¢ value chain orchestrator, which links agricultural smallholders to banks, insurance, input suppliers and agro-industry to cover the needs of the entire agricultural value chain continuum. During 2018, NADiRA produced encouraging results towards the operationalization of these services in irrigated rice cropping systems, using Sentinel-2 satellite data.
Simultaneously, the consortium developed a Geospatial Exploitation Platform (GEP), capitalizing on technologies and expertise developed with the European Space Agency during the last decade. Delivered in 2018 as a prototype implemented on Google Cloud, the GEP uses state of the art technology to organize, discover, collect and manage large quantities of geo-referenced data.
Its interfacing with agCelerant makes it the first fully automated processing system providing concurrent detection of field-level agricultural events, monitoring of crop response, and production forecasts based on combined field and EO data streams, which are both essential for operational exploitation and scalability, particularly in heterogeneous smallholder agriculture.
The first pilot in January 2018 aimed to monitor the irrigated rice crop season in the Senegal River Valley. Initially targeted at 4,000 farmers, the pilot highlighted the critical importance of data quality in field data streams to ensure service relevance. To solve this pivotal issue, automatic field data consistency checks, based on Artificial Intelligence techniques were developed and implemented into agCelerant.
Two rain fed crop pilots were later launched in Senegal and Nigeria by the consortium, implementing crop models combining field and Earth Observation to monitor overall crop conditions, emergent anomalies, and forecast final production. In Senegal, the objective was to test the operational preparedness of the business model on a limited scale (190 farmers), based on an agCelerant contract linking rice producers with a microfinance institution, an insurer and an industrial buyer. In Nigeria, the consortium enrolled 2,000 sorghum farms in the Bauchi, Kano and Niger states developing the data infrastructure and field data baselines to assess the feasibility of extending NADiRAâ€™s technical capability into the larger, but more complex rainfed agricultural systems typical of Africaâ€™s smallholder agriculture.
MANOBI undertook early outreach actions to market agCelerant as a vehicle for the numerous innovations developed in the framework of NADiRA. Key partners from several African countries expressed strong interest in the orchestration of smallholder value chains development, including the Islamic Development Bank, in relation to its Regional Rice Value Chain Programme, and Nigeriaâ€™s Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (FMARD). Several significant business opportunities were subsequently developed in 2018, which represent a positive input, based on a sound multi-scale analysis of market conditions, towards a viable business plan for NADiRA and the confirmation of NADiRAâ€™s first commercial market by 2020.

Final results

The successful replication all over Africa of the solution proposed by NADiRA with agCelerant is expected to have a direct socio-economic as well as an indirect political impact, bringing added value to strategic partnerships in addressing important issues.
The main anticipated socio-economic impacts consist in increased agricultural productivity by 15%, improved livelihoods of million farmers by 2025 and development of job opportunities for young people in farming, trading, coaching, thus helping to control youth unemployment and tighten the agri-cultural fabric in a potentially volatile societal context.
The project is also expected to contribute to the objectives of the Strategic African Union â€“ European Union (AU-EU) Partnership, more specifically in Area 3 (Human Development) and Area 4 (Sustainable and inclusive development and growth), thus improving local livelihood and reducing migration pressures. NADiRA directly contributes to the achievement of five of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 UN Agenda for Sustainable Development.
The project will also create innovation capacity, as the NADiRA platform will be open to scientists and service developers. Thanks to the organization put in place, the increasing wealth of data and the tools made available by the platform, they will be able to develop their own capacities â€“ at both pre-competitive and competitive stages â€“ in a large range of thematic domains such as forestry, water management, urban and rural planning, environment monitoring.