The Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA) and Mercy Corps’ AgriFin program have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to support ATA implement develop a data hub through which ATA will be able to derive insights from, and provide data-driven holistic solutions to farmers. The data hub will also enable ATA to implement a digital farm-management tool enabling farmers to make data-driven decisions, and improve existing processes and performances within ATA’s Farmer Production Clusters (FPC) program. The agreement was signed by ATA CEO Khalid Bomba and Mercy Corps/Agrifin Program Director, Leesa Shrader, in Addis Ababa and Nairobi.
“This partnership is an exciting and bold initiative for the two institutions. Since the initiation of the partnership last year, Mercy Corps’ AgriFin program has been supporting the ATA and its FPC program to design and test high-impact digital solutions for smallholder farmers. These solutions will ultimately be scaled, benefiting the 2.5 million smallholder farmers under the FPCs,” ATA CEO Khalid Bomba said.
Through the ATA-Mercy Corps AgriFin partnership, ATA is piloting Cropin’s SmartFarm platform, which will enable the organization to obtain real-time insights on the FPCs across various geographies, enabling it to provide timely recommendations and guidance to individual smallholder farmers as well as clusters based on these insights.
“ATA has always been at the forefront of technology innovation for the agricultural sector in Ethiopia, indeed across Africa,” said AgriFin Program Director, Leesa Shrader. She added, “Mercy Corps is honored to work with the ATA team to help them take their work to the next level, combining data and building responsive digital systems which can inform government, private sector and smallholder farmers’ critical work in agriculture, building a solid foundation for Ethiopia’s food security and economic growth.”
ATA, Mercy Corps sign MoU for the use of a digital platform to enable data-driven support to Farmers
Coronavirus – Africa: WHO concerned as COVID-19 cases accelerate in Africa
With more than 6000 COVID-19 cases reported in Africa, the virus is threatening fragile health systems on the continent. Infections are increasingly spreading not only between African countries but within different localities in the hardest-hit countries.
For instance, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where COVID-19 cases were at first confined to Kinshasa, now a handful of cases have been reported in the easternmost regions of the country that were until recently in the grip of an Ebola outbreak. In South Africa, all provinces have now reported cases. The outbreaks in Burkina Faso, Cameroon and Senegal are also widespread.
“Case numbers are increasing exponentially in the African region,” said Dr Matshidiso Moeti, the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Director for Africa “It took 16 days from the first confirmed case in the Region to reach 100 cases. It took a further 10 days to reach the first thousand. Three days after this, there were 2000 cases, and two days later we were at 3000.”
To contain COVID-19, many countries in Africa are implementing measures, which restrict gatherings and the movement of people. Nationwide lockdowns are in effect in Kenya, Uganda, the Republic of the Congo and elsewhere. However, governments must use these measures in a considered, evidence-based manner, and make sure that people can continue to access basic necessities.
As many people in the region live in crowded conditions or work in the informal sector and need to earn money daily to survive, it is important that countries make provisions to ensure that people can still access essential services. WHO is working closely with national governments and United Nations partners including the World Food Programme (WFP) to plan for these needs.
Dr Moeti and Lola Castro, the WFP Regional Director for Southern Africa, addressed the restrictive measures during a virtual media briefing held today by the WHO Regional Office for Africa with the support of the World Economic Forum.
“For socially restrictive measures to be effective, they must be accompanied by strong, sustained and targeted public health measures that locate, isolate, test and treat COVID-19 cases,” Dr Moeti pointed out.
A Coronavirus Thriller Was Finished Just Before the Shutdown
A Canadian filmmaker read the headlines, and a few weeks later a shoot was underway on a story addressing xenophobia and the pandemic. Then film festivals were canceled.
In between the time the coronavirus started to make headlines but before life shut down to restrain the pandemic, an independent filmmaker conceived, shot and finished postproduction on a movie about the contagion.
Thanks to the availability of relatively cheap digital equipment, there is rarely much lag time these days between real-life events — like Hurricane Sandy in 2012 or the Japanese tsunami in 2011 — and films about them. But this new movie, by Mostafa Keshvari, is unusual in that it was made even as the story is still unfolding.
Keshvari’s 63-minute “Corona” looks at what happens when seven people are trapped in an elevator, and begin to realize that one of them has Covid-19. The movie is about fear and “a study of society, people and moral choices,” Keshvari, 33, said in recent phone and email interviews about the movie. “We are all in this ride together.”
Vancouver, known as “Hollywood North,” is Canada’s gateway to Asia, and also an epicenter in the country’s Covid-19 crisis. As news reached here of a “Wuhan virus,” there were increasing reports of harassment of Chinese-Canadians and others of Asian heritage. Patronage of Chinese-Canadian businesses dropped by up to 70 percent.
The filmmaker was in an elevator reading the headlines when he had the idea.
“There were just so many incidents,” said Keshvari, who also runs BC Minorities in Film & TV Society, a network for budding artists from minority backgrounds. At the time he embarked on his project, “nobody thought a white person could get it. But the virus doesn’t discriminate.”
In real life, “everyone faces discrimination, all different kinds,” he said, so if he could “bring all these people” together in the film and “trap them,” he thought, then their “true colors come out.”
Starting in late January, he spent two weeks writing the script; the set took 10 more days to create. “We rented a space and we built an elevator,” he said. “Ultralow budget.”
Some cast members he already knew; others he found through word of mouth. The director also left room to improvise. “I told them: ‘Imagine that the actual coronavirus is in this elevator.’”
He wanted the action to unfold in real time, he said. “My struggle was to make sure it was all one shot,” Keshvari said.
Over three days in February, it took nearly 70 takes to pull that off. Money was running out. And time. “It helped with the anxiety of the film,” he said.
Outside, the coronavirus moved fast. “We thought it was just going to pass,” Keshvari said. “No one could have imagined.”
He had planned to submit the film, finished before the city declared a state of emergency, to festivals. “Unfortunately, that’s not the case anymore,” he said, as nearly every such event has been canceled for the foreseeable future. Streaming is the most likely option. The movie “belongs to humanity,” he said.
As for Keshvari’s cast and his crew of 25, he said, so far they are well. (New York Times)
UEFA puts all football on hold but target August
Uefa has called off June’s round of international fixtures, including the Euro 2020 play-offs, and has postponed the current Champions League and Europa League campaigns until further notice amid the coronavirus crisis. It is understood that one option under consideration is that the two club competitions could now be completed in July and August.
The governing body of European football met on Wednesday with general secretaries or chief executives of all its affiliated 55 national football associations, including the four British FAs, to receive updates from two working groups formed on 17 March to plot a way the game can resume following the total shutdown of professional sport this past month. The outcome was an almost complete suspension of activity until further notice, from youth competitions to the continent’s most prestigious tournaments in both the men’s and women’s games.
With this summer’s men’s European Championship having already been postponed until 2021, pressure to complete the play-offs – which include Scotland v Israel, Bosnia-Herzegovina v Northern Ireland and Slovakia v Republic of Ireland – is not imminent. England’s two scheduled friendly matches in June, in Austria and at home to Romania at Villa Park, are also off.
The question of what to do with the Champions League and Europa League, however, is more pressing. Both competitions were suspended in March with four ties remaining to be completed in the Champions League last 16, including Manchester City’s with Real Madrid and Chelsea’s with Bayern Munich. In the Europa League, none of the eight last-16 ties have been completed, with two first legs yet to take place.
