Irrigation Advisory

Active since 2016 and developed by Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR) in collaboration the University of Washington (UW) and NASA, the Irrigation Advisory is an SMS based advisory service for farmers in 40 districts of Pakistan. The UW is providing real time daily Potential Evapotranspiration (ET) and precipitation for entire Pakistan using NASA’s remotely sensed data. PCRWR determines crop coefficients (Kc) for different crops in different agro-climatic zones of Pakistan and throught this advisory informs farmers about their net weekly irrigation requirements, considering ET and precipitation. These advisory SMS messages are in local languages and come from a fully-automated system that does everything from downloading publicly available satellite data and distributing the text messages to using models to compute how much each farmer needs to irrigate. It covers all major crops including wheat, cotton, rice, sugarcane etc and after feedback from farmers, banana, papaya and chilli crops have been included into advisory.

Lead (category)

Government agency

Name of initiative lead (and partners)

Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR)

Categories of Digital initiative deliverables

Specific ICT technology product and/or service delivery

ICT products/solutions and services by category

Digital Agriculture

Non ICT products and services (deliverables)

Business and governance structure

Being implemented by a government agency Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR) in collaboration with University of Washington and NASA

DI ICT-deliverables format

Smart irrigation system

Primary stakeholders (beneficiaries, actors, enablers)

Farmers

Size, scale or scope of primary stakeholders

More than 20,000 farmers in 40 districts of Pakistan Source: Developer website

Digital Initiative development Stage

Fully functional. Institutional-governance structure in place

Measurable impacts on primary stakeholders and target beneficiaries

Initiative geographic scope (or coverage) (national, regional, sector specific, specific user co-horts etc)

National

40 districts of Pakistan

On-line resource links (Web-page links, links to videos, links to reports, etc)

Main DI webpage

Other useful link

Link to Digital village

Link to Digital solution