ICARDA is an international organization that for over four decades undertakes research-for- development to provide innovative, science-based agricultural solutions that improve the livelihoods resilience of rural dryland communities. ICARDA's mission is to reduce poverty and enhance food, water, nutritional security, and environmental health in the face of global challenges, including climate change. ICARDA is the only CGIAR research center headquartered in the non-tropical drylands. For more information: www.icarda.org. All 12 CGIAR Centers are currently engaged in a transformation effort (the 'One CGIAR') that will help the CGIAR achieve better impact through more strategically integrated research, unified governance, an integrated structure, and new research modalities. Several global and regional initiatives have been launched as part of the One CGIAR. The Excellence in Agronomy (Egypt Use Case) is an initiative that is particularly relevant to Egypt, where digital augmentation is a central theme of climate adaptation and sustainable agricultural development. The GeoAgro-MiSR is a digital tool that is created as an impetus to kickstart digital transformation in Egypt and to help the government of Egypt to rapidly realize the digital transformation agenda by helping the small holder farmers to take the right decision to optimize resources use to enhance the agronomic gains under the context of climate change and market volatilities. This tool is developed by ICARDA in partnership with the government of Egypt ministries and various other partners. At ICARDA we take the privacy of our users very seriously. This privacy statement explains what information we collect from our users, how we use that information, and what we do to protect it.
A. What information we collect and Save in Our Server through GeoAgro-MiSR?
We will collect the following information from our users:
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Personal information
User’s name, email address, phone number, age, gender, and role in agriculture. -
Technical information
Users IP address, and device information. -
Surveyed information
There is a module in the GeoAgro-MiSR called the GeoTagging Module through which we provide an option for the users to submit their field characteristics by asking few survey questions. This information (from multiple users) is appended to a central database. This rich database can be used by the planners and experts to develop appropriate policies and interventions. The questions asked through the GeoTagging Module are listed below. Note that this is purely a voluntary action that helps to foster citizen-led science. Lat/Long of plot, Name of Surveyor, Date of Survey, Time of Survey, Current Crop, Date of Sowing Previous Crop, Date of Harvesting, Crop Status, Soil Type, Water Management, Fertilizer Management, Estimated Crop Yield, Yield of Previous Crop, Typical Crop Rotation, General Comments, Picture of the Plot.
B. What Communication Information Pass Through Our Server through GeoAgro-MiSR?
There are three communication channels in the GeoAgro-MiSR app and all these essentially pass through ICARDA servers and is stored there either permanently or temporarily.
- Ask and Expert Module: Users can ask a question and take a photograph. The message goes to email of the experts sitting on the other side and he gets a expert response on his app in real time. Note that this is a one-to-one interaction.
- Announcement Module: Experts can provide announcements to all the farmers (e.g., availability of subsidies for a given crop, upcoming drought, upcoming pest etc).
- Chat Module: This module provides opportunity for the users of this app to chat among themselves and also form various groups and chat.
In all the three modules’ messages are exchanged between the users and the experts or between the users. They contain text, audio, and video files. These data will be stored in the ICARDA servers which is highly protected from cyberattacks.
C. How we use your information?
We use the information we collect from our users to for a variety of reasons
- The information collected in A [1] will used to do analytics on the trends in digital transformation of agriculture in Egypt with respect to the socioeconomic perspective. This will help the government to plan and start new initiatives.
- The information collected in A [2] will be used to send bespoke user-specific advisory based on the query send by the user to the experts in the “Ask and Expert’ module.
- The information collected in A [3] is used to do research on the agronomic performance and agronomic gains owing to digital augmentation of agriculture in Egypt. This will help the research organizations to plan novel initiatives and design novel climate smart agronomic solutions at scale.
- The location information obtained is used to provide location specific weather (real time and forecast) using api from third party services. The location information is also used to do high resolution remote sensing data analytics to provide user-defined information.
- Analyze how our users interact with our APP and improve the user experience.
- Comply with legal obligations and enforce our terms and policies.
D. Sharing of the Data that is Collected:
The data collected as mentioned in section A is primarily used for our own research and knowledge production efforts where the collected data may be summarized and published as scientific articles in reputed scientific journals. We may also share the collected data with prospective scientific collaborators. If the collected data and the analysis results have policy implications, it may be shared with the relevant policy makers (various ministries in Egypt).
E. How we protect your information:
We take appropriate measures to protect the information we collect from our users from unauthorized access, alteration, disclosure, or destruction. We use industry-standard security measures to safeguard your information, such as encryption and firewalls. Some actions we take are: Encrypting and salting of data at rest and in transit, Backup of the server and Audit log of who accessed what, and when.
F. Third-party Services:
We use third-party services. API from OpenweatherMap is used for location-specific current weather, forecasted weather and synoptic weather based on location of the user. These services collect information about your location to provide the right analytics. We also use the Google Earth Engine -based satellite data analytics to provide near real time field situation as understood from high resolution satellite products. This is again location specific, based on the inputs provided /obtained from the user
G. Your Rights:
You have the right to access, correct, and delete the personal information we collect from you. You may also have the right to restrict or object to the processing of your personal information. If you have any questions or concerns about your privacy rights, please contact us using the contact information provided below.
H. Updates to this privacy statement:
We may update this privacy statement from time to time to reflect changes in our practices or legal obligations. We encourage you to review this statement regularly for updates
I. Contact us:
If you have any questions or concerns about this privacy statement or our privacy practices, please contact us the Dr. Ajit Govind, Acting Head GeoAgro , International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), 2 Port Said, Victoria Sq, Ismail El-Shaaer Building, Maadi, Cairo, EGYPT. Email: a.govind@cgiar.org