Amid multiple challenges to food and nutrition security worldwide, global stakeholders are eager to identify ways to ensure sustainable, equitable, and reliable access to nutritious food for all. A growing focus is on “nutrition-smart” agricultural development strategies such as staple crop biofortification that aim to improve both nutrition and farm households’ livelihood potential.

Meanwhile, digital tech offers numerous tools—such as, mobile-based support and trade platforms, to digital marketplaces, drones and remote sensing devices, and traceability tools —that can help to efficiently integrate nutrition-smart agricultural approaches in food systems.

This participatory webinar focused on why and how tech is being applied in activities to empower smallholder farming households across Africa and Asia, and highlight specific examples. Discussion with implementers and experts included these key questions:

• What are smallholder farmers’ biggest roadblocks to improved productivity and livelihoods, and how might digital and other tech tools help them?
• What types of tech tools currently being leveraged by farmers and other value chain actors?
• What are key lessons learned so far in efforts in harnessing tech to benefit smallholder farmers and other value chain actors, from seed to plate?
• How can we ensure that tech is accessible, affordable, inclusive and attractive to biofortification actors, particularly women actors, and that it is based on sustainable business models?
• What challenges need to be addressed—such as data handling, scaling, sustainability and reliability?

Speakers and Panelists’ presentations:  

Ekanikpong Ben, CEO,  El-kanis and Partners, Nigeria 

Lynn Pinto, Strategic Account Manager, Cropin Technology Solutions

Morup Namgail, Head of Agri-Tech, IFFCO Kisan, India

Jawoo Koo, Senior Research Fellow, Environment and Production Technology Division, IFPRI

Jonathan Lehe, Chief of Strategy, Partnerships, and Innovation, PxD

Jenny Walton, Head of Commercialization and Scaling, HarvestPlus

Ravinder Grover, Project Manager, CBC Programme, HarvestPlus

Thandiwe Chidavarume, National Coordinator, Women and Land in Zimbabwe