RESILINK is a PRIMA project from Section 2 Multitopic 2021 Thematic Area 3 – Agro-food chain for increasing the resilience of smallholders with multi-platforms linking localized resource sharing.
Agriculture is an important sector for income generation, employment and food security in North Africa. Increasing the resilience of smallholders to face unexpected crises is a multidimensional challenge that requires a multifaceted policy. However, common to most crisis situations, the restrictions on movements has many impacts on the availability of distant resources such as agricultural supplies, equipment, services, labours and access to markets to name a few. Therefore, RESILINK will increase smallholder’s resilience by providing continuity of access to both resources and markets in crisis situations. It will empower the local agri-food value chain model by optimizing usage of local resources, promoting and generalizing local resource sharing approach and facilitating territorial markets. This local agri-food value chain model will also be integrated with the local e-commerce, supply & distribution channels. The concept of localized and short agri-food value chain will also impact on the agro ecological system by minimizing the food losses and contributing to the climate & environment changes with shorter food supply chains and logistics. As a result, new and local innovative services can be identified and created, enhancing further the smallholders’ agri-food chain.
The objectives of the project are to improve the agri-food value chain by optimizing usage of local resources, generalizing local resource sharing approach and facilitating territorial markets. It will develop distributed digital resource management platform for real-time exchange of information on territorial resources and supplies & demands; connecting smallholders to new supply, sharing opportunities and distribution channels. RESILINK will use cutting-edge digital technologies to connect fields and farms resources, automatize and add intelligence in the agri-food value chain to provide simple application interfaces adapted to smallholders. In addition, RESILINK will implement an incremental piloting & evaluation program to maximize smallholders’ acceptability, large-scale adoption and sustainable usage (even in non-crisis situations). Finally, RESILINK will address local innovation capacity and facilitate technology appropriation by developing the digital intelligent resource management platform in open-source with an extensive public API to maximize re-utilisation and facilitate the integration of new platforms.
RESILINK has the clear ambition to make digital smart technologies attractive & accessible to smallholders. The proposed solutions will be simple to use on a daily basis so that its usage will become natural, even in non-crisis situations. Then, by proposing a highly innovative generalized local resource sharing approach for smallholder’s agro-food chain, RESILINK will contribute to higher quality of products and services by maintaining continuity of access to resources. Therefore, RESILINK will definitely have an important impact on sustainability and competitiveness by promoting digital smart technologies to improve efficiency and by creating new business opportunities towards the smallholder communities. An important additional impact is on improving efficiency of small-scale farming system as generalized usage of local resources will definitely have a positive impact on the efficiency of these small-scale farming systems by reducing both delays and cost of access to resources. Finally, while RESILINK focuses on a generalized resource sharing platform for smallholders, the technology building blocks developed by RESILINK can easily be adapted to a larger variety of application domains. The large networks of actors built during the project will create synergies, increasing the likelihood of innovative third-party applications by local entrepreneurs for instance.
Category:
PRIMA | EU
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