Waterwatch Cooperative participated in the third GODAN workshop on “Creating Impacts with Open Data in Agriculture and Nutrition”, on 13-15 February 2017 in the Hague.

Waterwatch Cooperative is a member of the network Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN). GODAN is a public-private partner network that supports the proactive open sharing of data in agriculture. Open data are accessible by anyone. Sharing and using these open agricultural data results in contributing towards creating solutions to tackle food security. This leads to more efficient and effective decision making in agriculture as well as the development of data driven solutions.

Waterwatch Cooperative works with high resolution open satellite data that is released by the Copernicus program of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Data Portal of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). In addition, Waterwatch Cooperative in cooperation with the Food Agricultural Organisation (FAO) initiated an open database for Africa and the Middle East. This open access database is monitoring the “Water Productivity through Open access of Remotely sensed derived data” (WaPOR) and contributes to the global availability of open data. The WaPOR database is enabling the stakeholders in the agricultural supply chain to monitor their crops more efficiently and is available now via the following link.

During the workshop on “Creating Impacts with Open Data in Agriculture and Nutrition”(link) the diverse participants from almost all the continents discussed the next steps of creating more value and impact with open data. The themes of importance that emerged were the need for:
• more capacity building,
• more involvement in the private sector,
• big wins and
• more concrete actions to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and in particular SDG 2: End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture (more information here).