The ICT for Comprehensive Community Development in Agriculture (ICT4CCDA) project of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) has been selected as one of the Champion Projects of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Prizes 2021, reaching an important milestone at the international level. The WSIS Prizes represent an effective mechanism for evaluating the projects and activities that use ICT to drive sustainable development.
The overall goal of ICT4CCDA is to use ICT applications to spread specialized agricultural knowledge in the Arabic language, in Egypt and the Middle East, among over 21 million users. The project also aims to manage specialized knowledge portals through agricultural experts, and use smart knowledge applications to provide ICT-based agricultural services to support the state's efforts in improving agricultural productivity, maintaining food security and increasing income.
The project was launched by the Central Department for Community Development at MCIT, in collaboration with partners including the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Environment, the National Research Center, the Sudanese Ministry of Agriculture and Natural Resources, the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), KariaNet project of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and the International Development Research Center (IDRC).
The project is based on three pillars; the first is Aradina (Our Lands) portal, http://aradina.kenanaonline.com/. Aradina is based on three key concepts: the significance of knowledge for community development; the value of establishing a sustainable mechanism for producing, managing and updating specialized, authenticated, efficient and professionally-presented Arabic content in the agriculture sector; and the power of partnerships and networking for establishing knowledge-based organizations and building the knowledge society.
The second pillar is the expert system. It investigates the most efficient agriculture knowledge management and utilization of solutions that can empower farmers with expertise and knowledge in an easy optimized and updated way, to improve their agricultural productivity; thus helping overcome the food security problem in Egypt.
The third pillar is providing advanced knowledge applications, using the latest technologies. The applications include a smart water management system to regulate, preserve, and protect underground water resources through creating a knowledge portal that contains the best practices and technologies in water management; managing and aggregating data from the Internet of Things (IoT) sensors on the wells in the targeted urban areas, to monitor and analyze water consumption patterns; and supporting decision makers with timely dashboard of important indicators.
ICT4CCDA was selected as one of the top five projects that received the largest number of votes, out of 360 leading projects in 18 categories in development areas, and 1,270 nominated projects under the International and Regional Cooperation Category. The project made it through the final voting stages, which were conducted in March, online.
