Climate & Land-based Sectors
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Agriculture & Food Systems
NIRAS has extensive experience using digital solutions throughout the agricultural value-chain. Tailored to the needs of farmers, we are experienced in deploying technologies that help to modernise farming practices, unlock financing and cashflow issues and link farmers with markets and input suppliers.
What digitalisation can achieve
Digitalising agriculture offers huge opportunities across the agricultural value-chain, with the potential for transformational impact on food security, climate resilience, and poverty reduction for rural people. Farmer productivity can be significantly improved through smart-farming solutions, such as precision agriculture, sensors, and tailored information services to farmers (e.g. extension and weather information services). Digitalising agricultural value chains can also significantly improve farmer market access and financial inclusion (e.g. through e-commerce trading platforms and digital financial services respectively). And governments can use digital systems to enhance public services and support provided to farmers and rural citizens. The successful implementation of digital approaches in the agricultural sector however requires a full understanding of the local context and strategies to address the wider enabling environment: from the status of digital infrastructure access, to farmer digital behaviours and skills, along with details of the business and regulatory environment.
Services we offer
- Agricultural extension services and training through digital advisory platforms and mobile messaging
- Smart-farming solutions (precision agriculture, sensors, automation, and internet-of-things);
- Geospatial-technologies used for agricultural information services (weather, climate, and pest spatial data);
- Enhancing supply-chain linkages using mobile-phone based web applications and blockchain;
- Enhancing agricultural regional trade and market cohesion using digital platforms and solutions (e-commerce procurement platforms, market prices);
- Digital financial services and instruments tailored to smallholder farmers (mobile money, loans, and banking);
- Enhancing the enabling environment for digital technology uptake in agriculture and transformational impact (including optimisation of policy, regulatory and institutional drivers);
- Developing digital economy business models within digital agriculture ecosystems (technology hubs);
- Strategies for addressing the digital divide in rural agricultural contexts tailored for youth and women (digital connectivity at national and local levels, digital skills training); and
- E-government systems: state agrarian registries, national statistical systems and food stock monitoring systems.
Examples from our work
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Forests, people and biodiversity
NIRAS has the capability to use a wide range of digital solutions – like forest information systems, earth observation technologies and artificial intelligence – to support improved governance and inclusive decision-making of natural resources.
What digitalisation can achieve
Digital technologies are playing a key role in addressing global threats to forest and biodiversity conservation. Digital technologies like remote sensing and cloud-based information management systems offer vital opportunities in the monitoring of highly dynamic environmental changes, informing decision making and adaptive management. Cost-effective monitoring of difficult-to-measure social and environmental metrics at the local, landscape and global levels is also possible. When integrated into existing institutional processes, digital solutions can strengthen the governance of natural resources. To succeed, digital technologies need to be carefully tailored to the needs of the community end-users and combined with in-depth understanding of the local socioecological context.
Services we offer
- Agricultural extension services and training through digital advisory platforms and mobile messaging
- Smart-farming solutions (precision agriculture, sensors, automation, and internet-of-things);
- Geospatial-technologies used for agricultural information services (weather, climate, and pest spatial data);
- Enhancing supply-chain linkages using mobile-phone based web applications and blockchain;
- Enhancing agricultural regional trade and market cohesion using digital platforms and solutions (e-commerce procurement platforms, market prices);
- Digital financial services and instruments tailored to smallholder farmers (mobile money, loans, and banking);
- Enhancing the enabling environment for digital technology uptake in agriculture and transformational impact (including optimisation of policy, regulatory and institutional drivers);
- Developing digital economy business models within digital agriculture ecosystems (technology hubs);
- Strategies for addressing the digital divide in rural agricultural contexts tailored for youth and women (digital connectivity at national and local levels, digital skills training); and
- E-government systems: state agrarian registries, national statistical systems and food stock monitoring systems.
Examples from our work
NIRAS supported the Rwanda Ministry of Agricultural and Animal Resources to develop a fully automated satellite crop monitoring application to support management and decision-making through the nearly real-time monitoring of crop production, land use, and other biophysical data.
NIRAS has been working with local companies in Nepal and Uganda to develop digital tools and applications to improve efficiency and provide reliable data needed for decision making in the agriculture sector. The services vary from providing digital databases and financial management to virtual marketplaces and weather analytics and crop health monitoring.
NIRAS supported the development and implementation of the Kenya Agricultural Commodities Surplus Stocks Application in our Technical Assistance to phase two of ASDSP. The application was developed to collect data on staple foods for decision-making at the county level, with data shared at country and national levels. Data was collected from farmers, traders, aggregators, the country extension system, and agricultural food operators to manage priority value chains in each county and receive and communicate information from project stakeholders.
As part of a wider, multi country assessment, NIRAS reviewed the current state of Tajikistan and Uganda’s digital agriculture ecosystems and made recommendations for future programming opportunities for USAID interventions to unlock the potential for enhanced agricultural productivity and efficiency through greater usage of digital products and services.
In the EU-funded and NIRAS-managed Institutional Policy Reform for Smallholder Agriculture project, NIRAS supported digitalisation of the State Agrarian Registry in cooperation with the Ministry of Digital Transformation in Ukraine. The registry enables agricultural producers to apply for non-refundable assistance.
