 Welcome to Rao's very first AgriTech Talk, a monthly appointment to inspire us all to think tech when designing and implementing our projects and programs in less than 20 minutes a month. Each first Tuesday of the month, we'll invite guest speakers from inside and outside the organization to tell us about successes, challenges, solutions, and experiences trying to advance the digitalization of agriculture. My name is Daniela DiGiolantonio and I am the team leader for digital agriculture and today's host. Today's special guest is Diga Zarizda, Information Technology Officer from the FAO Agroinformatics Division of HQ, CSI, and he will tell us about the FAO Digital Services Portfolio, or the DSP, a FAO mobile app that can be utilized to deliver information and advisory services to farmers. Diga, welcome. Thank you, Daniela. Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Pleasure is a whole hour's. And I have four questions for you. We will now launch a timer and we will need to get these questions answered before the timer ends. No pressure. No pressure at all, right? But also in the last minutes, we will take a few questions from the audience. So let me ask everybody to write down their questions and comments in the chat, which will be monitored by my colleague Veronica. So timer will start running now. Are you ready? Yes, let's do it. Let's do it. So very first question for you, Diga. Can you tell us about the DSP? What is this and how everything started? Well, in a few words, the DSP is our mobile app that originated as part of the project in 2017 in pilot districts in Rwanda and Senegal. And since it grew, and now we have the whole toolkit encompassing application and tools. And essentially it's like you said, it's a app for the advisory services to deliver information to the farmers. And actually since then, now we are live in six countries, Senegal, Rwanda, Tanzania, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq. And there are a few projects ongoing this year into next year. Okay, so very interesting. So this sounds like a vehicle, an empty box, delivering information and advisory, which started in two countries, Rwanda and Senegal. And since then, expanded many others. So Diga, perhaps the best thing to really understand what is this app is to seed. Can you show us around? Wow, with pleasure. It's a pressure to show everything. So when you look into the application, this is a global version, the one we use for demonstrations. By default, it comes with the four themes, weather and crop calendar, livestock, agri-market place in nutrient food. And originated with this, and the idea was to deliver information on the crop production and animal, crop and animal production and all the processes surrounding them. So weather and crop calendar shows, first it's a weather forecast. We get from the Met Norway based on the GPS of the user. Obviously I'm in Rome. The advice, it's used to insert the messages which are important in season as a warnings or, and those are the messages also that can be broadcast to the farmers, registered farmers. As you can see, we enter the messages as a text messages, which can be supported by audio message as well. And now it's the capability has been extended to be supported by video and image. We here are connected to the, another file product, crop calendar. And here we have information for the countries that have entered based on the agricultural zones. And here for each agricultural zones, countries indicate which crops are important. And then we enter, they have the information. So the basic, the sort of a crop calendar for the period for the country, for that crop. Then you have some general information about the crop itself, which can be obviously extended. And then advices again in a similar form as before. Here you can also notice that we can indicate who is providing the information. So this one in particular comes from the Ministry of Agriculture. So accordingly the logo shows up there. So then we have a livestock, which is sort of built similarly. We have here the advice on the production. So for first it's a species, and then you have breeds. So, and then we can again group the messages by either animal health, animal production, or, but in a country they can do whatever they want to. In addition, we have information here about the diseases, treatments, and more information is entered by the country specialists in live countries. And then we have here vaccination. We cannot see right now anything, but because there is no information for Italy, but in the live countries here you see the vaccination calendars, sometimes even prices, et cetera. Next one is agri-market place, and obviously it speaks for itself. This bite default is connected to another, what do you call it, foul product. Here we have Tajikistan, and this is a FPMA, Food Price Monitoring Application. And information is organized in commodities and markets, and you can view a commodity in different markets, or you can view the commodities available in the market. I have to tackle be back and forth because this is sort of a global instance of the application, and, but in a country this would be just an information about the country. So like I said, you can see the markets, and then for each market you can see whatever commodities prices are available, okay? And the last one is in-nutri-food, and this theme is dedicated to providing advice on harvest to post-harvest practices, and practices and processes to maintain the nutritional value of the product, to deliver high quality products to the customers, as well as some maybe tips about how to create a value-added production. So this is a tool, and we modified many things to make it easier to manage the information in a tool, and for that we'll build a toolkit, which I'm showing you here, the instance of Tanzania. It's an interesting one because they used the default themes, but also with our tools now, they can add additional themes on the fly. You can see here aquaculture, which is important for Tanzania. So here everything is organized the similar way, the way you see it in application, and then on a bottom of the structure, you have messages and you just can add any message. I'm playing here, and obviously this is a development instance, and once you publish, it becomes available in the application. We support the multilingual application, so here you manage the application in English, and then you can do the same in Swahili. Also, we use the auto translation services provided, it's a Google-based application, so we use the Google services, and here we can automatically translate what we have entered, and that gives the users the base for sort of starting base, and then they can update the information if needed. This is a capability, we call it a theme factory, to create the new themes, just like aquaculture, and we provide some examples, how to structure to go forward, to help users to manage the content. I'll stop here, and yes. Thanks a lot, Diga. So if I understand correctly, the mobile app is for the farmers and come by default with information and weather forecasts on crop calendars, if available in the FIO crop calendar tool, market prices, again, can integrate with FDMA if they are available, but then the content provider, let's say, could make available any sort of information in advisory services by creating new teams by using the tool that you just showed us. Well, this is very interesting. So a very simple tool that could be deployed even immediately and then make it custom for the country. So then let me ask you, because you showed us the name of an organization there that was providing the content in Tanzania, but then, so who creates the content? Who developed the content? Who updates the content? And who eventually will own this mobile app? And what about farmers? Is it free for them to download it? So I'll start with the ownership. We manage the technology and we sort of own the technology, the app itself, thus taking burden of technological adventure and creating the app. And we give it, make it available to the countries, interested countries together with the country offices, and then they become custodians of the content. So they are in charge. So far we had different partners for the content management. It's somewhere between Ministry of Agriculture, research centers in Jordan, and some extension services, for instance, in Senegal. We're looking into new private partnerships. There is a small project coming up in Kazakhstan working with the union. We'll see how that goes with the union of private organizations. And as far as farmers goes, once the application is deployed, there is a local version in a country, in a Google Play Store of the country, it's available free of charge to the farmers and we don't even register them really, no privacy issues, et cetera. Thank you. So we could even think of different delivery models. While so far, if I understood correctly, it has been the Ministry of Agriculture supported by the country office, having to manage the advisory that are being sent through the app, we could actually consider other delivery models such as you just told us about the example of Kazakhstan where perhaps you will work, you will deploy the application through the dairy union of Kazakhstan farmers so that they can send advisory services to their farmers. Terrific. Then let me ask you a more practical question because I'm sure many of the people that are following us today would like to ask this question. So let's imagine that somebody here would like to introduce the app through a project in their country. How much would it cost? And what should be the key steps to get started? We have less than a minute. So to introduce, utilizing it in an existing project is best because there are existing beneficiaries and it's easier to sort of promote it. Our services to help and support the full project cycle is by default around 20,000. If there are any special technical issues, there might be a need for a little bit more. The starting point is to, first of all, to identify that there is a need together with the local stakeholders, with the local authorities, the whole sort of group of custodians in the country, identify motivated stakeholders and people who will be organizations that are motivated to create and maintain the content for the application. So once that's done, it can be part of the project cycle and it takes around two, three months to introduce and obviously then it has to be maintained and updated and enriched with the content. I see, so it could be done with relatively little resources. Yes. Relative. The biggest resources of people in the country, technical resources. Financially, yes. Diga, time is over for my questions, but now let's go take a couple of questions from the audience. Veronica, you have been monitoring the chat. What are our colleagues curious about? Thank you, Daniela. Diga, so we have a couple of questions. For instance, Katrina is interested to know, is it possible to collect feedback from the users through the app, other opportunities to interact with the farmers, for instance, through the polls or collect results, insights and the feedback? Another question from Eugen is, he's curious to know if it's possible to add new functionalities, such as benchmarking. And perhaps another question from Murad in terms of extension services. Do you consider adding real time and tailored advisory services in real time by agricultural consultants? I'll share my screen for the first, actually, you know what? I'll skip the whole sharing. I forgot to show, but on the application, there is a, on the right, there is a blue button feedback. And we, from anywhere in the application, farmers can submit the feedback, either anonymously or identify themselves if they want to get back some answers, right? About, sorry, so feedback, yes. Then the word, the early warnings, basically the real time notifications. The real time notification. Any message in the application can be broadcast or you can add a new message from the toolkit and it can be broadcasted instantly as a notification, basically, what's up message. And, I tried the app and users can really receive a push notification, right? So it can really be used as early warning too. Absolutely. And then the current question was, can we add new features? We can, depends, like I said, when you say feature, it depends. If it's just a theme, which is concentrated around particular content, say financial education or anything else, you can create the structures on a fly, like aquaculture in Tanzania and populate the information. If it's something connected to other tools or something else, you will need our engagement and we will help you out, obviously. But, I mean, there are a lot of possibilities and unfortunately this is a type of question that we need some more time to answer. And in the interest of time, maybe through you, Daniela and your team, we can have a discussion with the interested parties. Exactly. I hope I answered questions. Thanks a lot. So I can see this sparked a lot of interest from our colleagues and I can see there are still questions that haven't been answered, but let's do something, let's save them so that Diga can get you an answer in writing. Thank you very much, Diga. It was a pleasure to have you here today to learn about the DSP and Veronica please put the link in the chat so that anybody can browse the app by themselves so they can see around.