An exponential growth in data has accompanied the digitalisation of agriculture through the proliferation of mobile technology, remote sensing technologies and distributed computing capabilities among others. The effective management of this data will open up new opportunities to better the lives and livelihoods of smallholder farmers by lowering cost and reducing information asymmetries.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (UNFAO), the Panafrican Framers Organization (PAFO) and the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) are offering an online course in farm data management designed to harness this opportunity, building on the GODAN Action online courses - “Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition”, which has been offered since November 2017 and has so far trained over 4,400 participants.

The Farm Data Management, Sharing and Services for Agriculture Development online course will focus on strengthening the skills of professionals who use and manage data to help farmers and farmers organisations. The course explores the importance of data in the agriculture value chain and how new and existing technologies, products and services can leverage farm level and global data to improve yield, reduce loss, add value and increase profitability and resilience.

The course aims to strengthen the capacity of farmers’ organisations, data producers and data consumers to manage, use and share data in agriculture. It aims to raise awareness of different types of data formats, data rights and applications, and to highlight how important it is for data to be reliable, accessible and transparent for innovation and development of agriculture.

Find more information on the course and how to enrol here on the CTA Web site.