TECHNICAL WORKSHOP | The Potential of Digital Tools to Support Farmers in Egypt: lessons learned and way forward

Tuesday, November 9, 2021

2:00 pm to 4:00 pm (Cairo Local Time)

© Lee Dixon

The potential of digital tools to transform smallholder agriculture in Egypt has attracted substantial enthusiasm in public discourse as well as in development policy and investment agendas. In the last few years, several public and private sector initiatives have been launched with the objective of building digital tools to support smallholder agriculture in Egypt. However, most of these efforts and initiatives remain scattered and fragmented and lack coordination and integration within national agricultural systems. As such, the impact of these digital tools to transform smallholder agriculture and, hence, the livelihood of smallholders remains largely understudied.

IFPRI, under the USAID-funded project, Evaluating Impact and Building Capacity (EIBC), organized this technical workshop with the aim to mobilize various actors’ efforts as well as support the Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation (MALR) consolidate and mainstream existing digital services in Egypt that are meant to support farmers. This technical meeting was split into 3 main sessions:

• The first session offered a series of presentations from different panelists, highlighting the potential of digital tools to support smallholders, bringing in both international and domestic experiences. The session also featured IFPRI’s recent review paper on digital technologies and international and regional experiences.
• The second session was a live demo session, whereby IFPRI launched its online repository of Agriculture Digital Tools in Egypt. The repository aims to help actors and stakeholders (e.g., MALR) streamline and access, in a user-friendly interface, various existing agriculture digital tools operating in Egypt. In this session, IFPRI presented a description of the major features of a mobile app that IFPRI is working to develop in partnership with local app developers and MALR. Following that there was a rapid showcase of some of the existing agriculture-focused mobile applications in Egypt, whereby different app developers ran a virtual tour of some of these developed apps.
• The third session was a virtual breakout room discussion, whereby different technical experts from national and international organizations, donors, and private sector app developers were split into different discussion rooms to share best practice experiences and lessons learned in the design of mobile digital tools.  The aim of this session was to draw synergies between different efforts as well as inform IFPRI’s ongoing project to create a demand-driven agriculture mobile application for farmers in Egypt.

 

Video Recording of the workshop:

Event Moderators Fatma Abdelaziz Senior Research Associate, IFPRI Kibrom Abay Egypt Country Program Leader and Research Fellow, IFPRI

Clemens Breisinger
MENA Regional Program Leader and Senior Research Fellow, IFPRI

Mohamed El Kersh
Assistant to the Minister, Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation, Egypt

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Egypt Agriculture Apps repository

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