AGROVOC is a multilingual and controlled vocabulary tool led by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). This valuable resource enablesdata to be classified homogeneously, facilitating interoperability and reuse. It offers a structured collection of agricultural concepts, terms, definitions, and relationships which are used to unambiguously identify resources. It provides a way to organize knowledge for subsequent data retrieval.
In 2021, as a part of an ongoing collaboration with FAO, ICARDA’s Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) team translated approximately 800 concepts in AGROVOC into Arabic, vastly improving knowledge sharing in Arabic speaking countries – one of the most important regions globally for its agrobiodiversity and climate-smart agricultural approaches.
ICARDA’s MEL and SEPR teams were excited to win an award for LUP4LDN – a tool that helps inform improved land planning and restoration activities. The award, issued by the Group on Earth Observation Land Degradation Neutrality Initiative, was overseen by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. LUP4LDN – (Land Use Planning for Land Degradation Neutrality) is a user-friendly interface that facilitates participatory land-use planning to support land restoration efforts, achieve sustainable land degradation neutrality, and prevent ongoing degradation.
ICARDA was thrilled when the World Overview of Conservation Approaches and Technologies (WOCAT) published information on 10 ICARDA innovations. WOCAT, a global network promoting sustainable land management, is a prestigious stage on which to feature, with a wide audience of experts and decision makers, among others. Our innovations, submitted by ICARDA’s MEL team can now be referenced by agricultural experts all over the world, fulfilling ICARDA’s core vision of open-source knowledge sharing.
The ICT2Scale project in Tunisia, funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), in collaboration with the German Agency for Inernational Cooperation (GIZ), concluded in September 2021, but its legacy lives on to support smallholder farmers and rural communities. The project, led by Dr. Udo Rudiger, introduces information and communications technology services to family farmers. ICT2SCALE Innovations include e-learning training modules on crop and small ruminant production, beekeeping and conservation agriculture. The project also helped develop bilingual Arabic-French smartphone apps that provide useful data such as price information on agricultural commodities in near real-time, helping farmers set prices and improve profits. Almost 1000 farmers received technical advisory SMS on a weekly basis.
