Work Package 2: Agri-business & IT
Work Package 2 (WP2) aims at providing services to promote and facilitate improving water productivity. It involves connecting with small and medium-sized enterprises, non-governmental organisations, and agri-businesses, and engage them in putting water productivity into practice. Farmers, suppliers, financers, processing industries, public sector, and information technology (IT) companies need to collaborate to develop solutions to improve water productivity.
The objective of WP2 is to:
- Identify local use cases and engage with, and support (potential) WaPOR users through local service centers (engage)
- Improve access to and interpretation/analysis/usage of WaPOR data and information by (co-)developing applications (develop)
- Share, demonstrate and showcase water productivity tools through a repository and country based water productivity events (demonstrate)
Activities and Outputs
Compendium of approaches to improve Water Productivity
This compendium focusses mainly on interventions that improve the biophysical water productivity. While the focus is on improving water productivity, it also includes interventions that improve land productivity and the water use efficiency as they go hand in hand. The document can be found here. The interactive website can be found here.
WaPORACT Toolbox
WaPORACT is an open-access tools to extract, interpret, analyse and visualize geodata to improve water productivity. WaPORACT supports the development of customized geodata services in Africa and the Near East. It is a suite of Python tools to retrieve, aggregate, analyze, visualize and disseminate FAO WaPOR water productivity data. The complete toolbox is available open-access at Github and provides the building blocks for customized tool development to target specific user needs.
Establishment of Service Centres
The WaterPIP project is collaborating with partners in Kenya, Sudan and Ethiopia to co-develop water productivity solutions. The selected service centers are:
- Association of Irrigation Acceleration Platform (AIAP), Kenya
- Ethiopian Construction Design and Supervision Works Corporation (ECDSWCo), Ethiopia
- Hydro-agriculture Service Center (HSC), Sudan
The WaterPIP project guide, train and coach the service centers in developing products and services for water productivity, from (1) identifying users and use cases to (2) developing customized applications using WaPOR data to (3) demonstrating the tools to the users. The WaterPIP partners and the service centers co-create in a team that brings together the WaterPIP expertise on WaPOR data & analytics and the service centers market/user expertise and network.
What is Water Productivity?
To help kick off the WaterPIP project, a series of introductory videos were created to help describe what is Water Productivity and how can we use the WaPOR database to better understand on-the-ground conditions.
Take a look at the What is Water Productivity video as well as other videos on water productivity and the WaPOR portal.
Water Productivity Masterclass Series
In June and July of 2020, the WaterPIP project put on a series of Masterclasses on different aspects of water productivity, methods on how to monitor each one, and different open source tools that can be used by practitioners.
Go to the event homepage to see more information or go to the WaterPIP YouTube playlist to view all the videos from the series.
WaterPIP Hackathon: From database to application
In November and December 2020, the WaterPIP Hackathon was launched, bringing together over 250 scientists, engineers, programmers, communications specialists, and local experts to create real-world applications using WaPOR remote sensing data (wapor.apps.fao.org).
Go to the event homepage to see more information or go to the WaterPIP YouTube playlist to view all the videos from the event.