Speaker Bio & Abstract

 
Sam Compton Operations Director
GODAN
United Kingdom

BiographyMr. Compton is Operations Director for the Global open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) Secretariat. GODAN supports the proactive sharing of open data to make information about agriculture and nutrition available, accessible and usable to deal with the urgent challenge of ensuring world food security. GODAN is an alliance of over 860 partners made up of governments, businesses, NGOs and research institutions.

Mr Compton has 20 years of experience in the development arena managing programmes for international donor organisations, most recently with focus on rural resilience and addressing conflict over land and natural resources. He has served as a country director for a number of multi-year projects on behalf of USAID. He has an LLB and MSc.AbstractWorldwide, yields need to increase in order to feed a growing population and smallholders need greater availability of data to help make decisions that improve the reliability and consistency of food production.

Open data is at the heart of present innovations in agriculture but for it to be effective it requires a shared agenda that increases the supply, quality, and interoperability of data, alongside action to build capacity for the use of data by everybody across the food value chain.

Increasing and improving policies that provides access and use of open data is essential to scale-up solutions for agriculture and nutrition. This requires greater collaboration to enable access and use of open data, with special attention to Africa and Asia.

The presentation will link the need for much better policies that will open-up a vast amount of data already collected. The need is to help smallholders gain knowledge from existing data so they can generate higher yields in the very countries that presently suffer food shortages or have poor nutrition. The task is to improve agriculture in countries that need it the most while protecting the environment – open data linked to relevant services and devises can help achieve this goal.