ICARDA Wins Inspire Challenge Awards
The CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture received a record of more than 120 submissions for the fourth annual Inspire Challenge, with broad engagement across CGIAR centers along with public and private sectors. The challenge committee selected fifteen proposals as finalists. ICARDA secured four finalist spots and won two of the Inspire Challenge seven awards.
The Inspire Challenge is CGIAR's signature digital innovation process. It leverages the global footprint and deep food-security subject matter expertise of CGIAR with expert industry partners to link digital technologies to impact in developing economies. The teams pitched their proposals to a panel of expert judges at the virtual Big Data in Agriculture convention “Digital Dynamism for Adaptive Food Systems” on 19-23 October. ICARDA’s successful pitches are the ClimaCell Locust Project and Big Data in Resilience of Rangeland Communities.
ClimaCell in collaboration with ICARDA leads the ClimaCell Locust Project, alongside Kenavara Group, U.S. NOAA, and NCAR as partners. This project is an innovative 360-degree digital locust monitoring tool that aims to address the locust crisis for use by public and private sector organizations. It will provide critical support to the response of local stakeholders impacted by locust.
ILRI leads the second winning project with ICARDA and ICRAF as partners. This project is a comprehensive global platform for critical data on the rangelands. It establishes the first-ever global data platform, which will consolidate data on rangelands, including rangelands health, change, risks and opportunities for restoration from existing sources as well as from new sources such as satellite imagery and crowd-sourcing.
Know more about the other two projects that made it to the finalists:
ICARDA GEOINFORMATICS PLATFORM