RESILINK: increasing resilience of smallholders with multi-platforms linking localized resource sharing

Abstract

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. RESILINK [1] is a Research & Innovation Action (RIA) project funded by the PRIMA organization in the context of the 2021 Section 2 call on Increasing the resilience of small-scale farms to global challenges and COVID-like crisis by using adapted technologies, smart agri-food supply chain and crisis management tools. 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. To implement the generalizing local resource sharing approach, RESILINK will develop a 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. While the ideas of connecting smallholders to market and sharing resources are not new, the approach taken by RESILINK is to provide a unique platform-of-platforms capable of integrating existing or future platforms into comprehensive dashboards/portfolios. To achieve its objectives, RESILINK will: develop a resilient RESILINK network ensuring high availability of services where number of distributed, light-weight and collaborating platforms that will be run on the network of Edge-IoT gateways; implement the platform-of-platforms approach for large-scale adoption and sustainability: (a) RESILINK wrapper components will enable resources from existing digital platforms to be discovered & integrated and, (b) RESILINK open API will allow development of new digital sharing platforms that can fully inter-operate with the RESILINK digital resource management platform to benefit from the RESILINK community; use cutting-edge modern Artificial Intelligence where RESILINK’s digital platform will leverage contextual intelligence to efficiently discover resources, identify trends, forecast and propose pertinent correlated resources; seamlessly integrate IoT technologies to automatize a number of information exchanges related to resource sharing. RESILINK will further develop Edge-IoT components and demonstrate IoT integration benefits for resource sharing; run an extensive piloting & evaluation program with smallholders for large-scale testing to ensure RESILINK’s concepts acceptance and validate RESILINK components in a step-by-step and incremental manner