CGIAR's Big Data Platform: Leveraging Data for Impact

CGIAR’s Big Data Platform will harness the capabilities of Big Data to accelerate and enhance the impact of international agricultural research by providing opportunities for researchers to analyze and visualize agricultural data on a large scale to generate rapid, actionable insights. A key aspiration is to build and nurture partnerships across all CGIAR Centers and a variety of external partners to deliver effective big data management, analytics and ICT-focused solutions to target geographies and communities. The platform encompasses three modules: Module 1 addresses the necessity to enable a culture that values data as a product in itself with global public good potential, and applies best practices to managing and making it widely available following FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) Open Access principles. An infrastructure is also envisioned to harvest research data from interoperable repositories and M+E platforms, coupled with tools for seamless analysis and visualization, leading to decision-based decision support and foresight. Module 2 fosters collaboration and convening around big data and agricultural development via ambitious external partnerships to deliver the potential of big data to smallholder agriculture. Module 3 inspires big data approaches that deliver development outcomes through projects that solve key challenges. These may include projects that use big data analytics and ICTs to provide multi-disciplinary data to researchers, deliver novel information to farmers, monitor the state of agriculture and food security in real time and inform critical national, regional and global policies and decisions.