Second Call CoP Digital Solutions – June 22, 2020

On June 22, 2020, the second meeting of the Food security and COVID-19 CoP on Digital Solutions was convened by 2SCALE. Present were representatives from: the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), the Netherlands Space Office (NSO)/G4AW, the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO), the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA), and the Netherlands Food Partnership (NFP). On the basis of the first meeting a proposal for an action perspective of this CoP was discussed. In preparation, a mapping was carried out to inventory the activities of organizations in the realm of digital technologies in food security programming. However, as involvement of the implementing organizations was still limited, an intermediate step was proposed: organizing a series of three webinars to kick start this CoP with a practical perspective.

In a time where webinars are everywhere, the proposal was to focus on very practical use cases with experiences from the field on very specific topics. Three topics were identified for the webinar series:

1. Response: How can digital solutions help SMEs and NGOs respond to the problems raised by movement restrictions, in reaching out to farmers?
2. Recovery: How can digital solutions help agribusiness SMEs to restore their markets and to get back in touch with clients; and NGOs to get back in touch with end-beneficiaries?
3. Resilience: How can COVID-19 be used to accelerate adoption of digital solutions and with that create more resilience across agricultural value chains?

Organization and planning of the webinars was discussed, including potential cases. For the final webinar a collaboration with the CoP Finance would be established. Target audience for the series are practitioners involved in agricultural development with a particular interest in digitization of their own work.