Irrigation Advisory
Pakistan
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)
Link to Digital village
Link to Digital solution