Vote now! Reward the outstanding free services offered by the Digital Agri Hub to support the transformation of the agricultural sector

 

The Digital Agri Hub run by the Wageningen University and Research (WUR) has been nominated as a potential candidate awardee for the UN / ITU WSIS 2024 prize in the Category 13 - AL C7 E-agriculture. 

The Hub offers free access to a dashboard with over 1200 digital solutions for agriculture in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and to digital communities hosted on community platforms. 

The winners of the WSIS 2024 prizes will be selected based on the result of a public voting process.

How to vote:

• Only registered members of the WSIS Stocktaking Platform (STK) with requested complete information may vote for/appreciate a project. The information should contain organization details: name, type, country and user details: username and e-mail.
• Members may only vote for one project in each category 
• Voters are encouraged but not required to cast votes for one project in each of categories.

Voting – step by step (for new STK members):

1. Register https://www.itu.int/net4/wsis/stocktaking/Account/ 
2. Confirm your registration via the confirmation email you will have received in your inbox
3. Login
4. Select Prizes on the top navigation bar.
5. Select “Vote” > “Vote ->”
6. Select: “Voting form”
7. Select: AL C7. E-agriculture on the drop-down menu.
8. Scroll down, look for Digital Agri Hub and click on “Vote for this Project”
9. Optional: Select other categories of your interest and express your preferences as well.

Voting – step by step (for already registered STK members)

1. Follow this link: https://www.itu.int/net4/wsis/stocktaking/Prizes/2024 
2. Select “Vote” > “Vote ->”
3. Login
4. Select: “Voting form”
5. Select: AL C7. E-agriculture on the drop-down menu.
6. Scroll down, look for Digital Agri Hub and click on “Vote for this Project”
7. Optional: Select other categories of your interest and express your preferences as well.

Developing Institutions and Inter-Organizational Synergies through Digitalization and Youth Engagement in African Agriculture: The Case of “Africa Goes Digital”

As digitalization increasingly gains attention in the agriculture sector, many African youths are seizing the opportunity provided by digital technologies to engage in agriculture. 

While prior studies have started examining the intricacies of digitalization in agriculture, they have paid less attention to its implications for fostering institutions and inter-organizational synergies that can support and sustain the businesses of youth enterprises engaging with Africa’s agriculture. Against this backdrop, the authors undertook a qualitative case study to shed light on the development of a community of practice comprising youth enterprises engaging in agriculture through digitalization. Thus, they studied Africa Goes Digital (AFGD), a consortium of young African enterprises that rely on digital technologies and solutions to provide services to farmers across the African continent. 

Africa Goes Digital - Transforming Africa into #TheAfricaWeWant from Federico Rambaldi on Vimeo.

The results showed that: (1) the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation ACP-EU (CTA) played a pioneering role as a development agency in supporting enterprises with drones and training for agriculture, which led to the formation of AFGD; (2) two prevalent themes characterized the services offered by AFGD members; (3) AFGD brings members under one platform where they leverage WhatsApp for communication and knowledge sharing and Twitter to showcase success stories and form partnerships with each other to execute certain development projects with governments and development agencies; (4) the lack of regulations or the restrictive regulations on the use of drones are still problems that some members face, and the high costs of sensors and related drones are challenges for the members. 

Building on the results, the authors discuss the implications of digitalization for supporting African governments in meeting sustainability goals and conclude by describing the theoretical contribution of their study and promising future research directions.

Authors: Matthew Ayamga , Abdelaziz Lawani, Selorm Akaba and Arsene Birindwa

Read and download the full article.