Capacity building for digital agriculture in HEIs in third countries

ended

Agricultural transformation is a priority in the policy agenda of several countries not associated to the Erasmus+ programme to meet the challenges of food and nutrition insecurity, climate change, youth unemployment and overall economic growth. In this context, digitalization of agriculture could be a game changer in boosting productivity, profitability and resilience to climate change. In this line, DEEP FARM is a consortium of 12 partners where 3 European universities will support 8 universities in four third countries (Madagascar, Ivory Coast, Haiti and the Dominican Republic) to addresses the skills gap existing and will work to reinforce the knowledge and capacity of students in agronomy degrees with new tools in AI and Big Data to face the challenges in modern agriculture in a “learning by doing approach” to support the Green Deal. With this purpose, it will tackle the different state of advancement and challenges of the HEIs located in the third countries and will address their specific regional needs by delivering theoretical training courses on e-agriculture and experimental activities through country specific Uses Cases for: olive crops (Turkey), rice (Madagascar), cocoa (Ivory Coast), strawberry and mango (Haiti), and banana (Dominican Republic). More than 245 students involved in DEEP FARM with complementary profiles (computer science & agronomy), 45 professors, and 10 entities/stakeholders such as farms and IT companies involved in the use cases will be benefited from the execution of the project. Indeed, the training will contribute to address the mismatches between the requirements of employers and the offer of higher education institutions. As result, the HEIs in the mentioned third countries will generate online training content to be available as a MOOC in FUN platform, as well as real data obtained from the Use Cases that will be available in ESTIA’s DATA LAB.