The Festival & Expo is one of the few moments in the calendar where people working on very different parts of the agrifood data system actually share a room. National statistics offices, community-led initiatives, civil society, government, and private sector actors don't naturally speak a common language around data — and the structured collision the Festival & Expo creates is genuinely hard to replicate elsewhere.
The co-hosting arrangement is worth noting in its own right. The Kenya Space Agency, leading the event jointly with the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics and the Global Partnership, signals that the centre of gravity has shifted toward country institutions hosting and shaping the agenda, rather than donors convening and inviting countries in.
With such a diverse cross-section of attendees and topics under one roof, this is a real opportunity for a new way of working — one where country institutions take the lead, to carry across into conversations on financing and uptake, not just methodology.
Sessions not to miss
Regulating Without Excluding: What Data Actually Works in Informal Food Systems (June 3, 8 am) Informal food systems represent a significant share of how most people in Africa actually eat — and official statistics have systematically failed to measure them. This session goes after that gap directly, which makes it one of the more practically grounded conversations of the week for anyone working on food security data.
Building the Data Quality Chain: Strengthening Hands-on Skills for Climate and Agriculture Development (June 3, 2 pm) Hands-on capacity building at the climate-agriculture overlap. Useful if your work involves survey design or field data collection and you want concrete methods rather than frameworks.
Leveraging Data and Space-Derived Intelligence for Agricultural Resilience (June 3, 4 pm) A main stage slot with the Kenya Space Agency at the centre. Watch for where the methodological discussion goes — space-derived data for agriculture is moving fast institutionally, and what gets positioned as the default approach here will matter.
From Data to Decisions: How Governments Are Using Agricultural Statistics for Policy Through the 50x2030 Initiative (June 4, 11 am) Country governments walking through what translating agricultural statistics into policy actually looks like in practice — including how they are using georeferenced data and crop-cut data to field-validate models. Concrete and specific in a way that much of the policy-data conversation is not.
From Satellite to Startup: Unlocking Earth Observation Data for AI in Africa (June 4, 4 pm) Connects Earth Observation to the AI development ecosystem that increasingly drives the agricultural innovation pipeline. The session is organised through the GIZ AI Made in Africa project and includes perspectives from the Kenya Space Agency — relevant if you want to understand where the institutional relationships around EO and agriculture are being formed.
Global Push to Put Mobile Phone Data to Work for Statistics (June 3, 4 pm) Mobile phone data is one of the methods being recombined with traditional agricultural surveys. This session brings together national statistical offices from Botswana, Kenya, Ghana, Spain, and Kazakhstan alongside ITU and World Bank experts — worth attending to see where operationalisation is actually working versus where it remains aspirational.
AI Opportunities for Enhanced Climate Change Data: A Global South Perspective (June 4, 11 am) An early conversation with direct implications for agricultural data before methodological norms harden. The Global South framing matters here — the default assumptions baked into AI approaches to climate data are largely built on datasets and infrastructure that don't reflect African contexts.
Collaborative Data Ecosystems: Building AI-Ready Data for Better Decisions (June 5, 8 am) Data for Now has been working with agricultural use cases as one of its main strands. Useful for understanding what "AI-ready" agricultural data actually requires in practice, and what the gap looks like between current country-level data systems and that benchmark.
Nationally Owned, Sustainably Financed: A New Path for Health and Demographic Statistics (June 4, 4pm) Framed around health and demographic data, but the financing question it addresses is the same one agricultural statistics has to keep answering. Worth attending across thematic lines.
The Future of Census: Digitization and Global Pathways to the 2030 Round (June 3, 4pm) Agricultural census sits inside this conversation. The next ten-year round is being shaped now — the decisions made about methods, technology, and financing in the next few years will have long consequences.
Explore the full program here.
One thing to watch for
The institutional question of who produces, owns, governs, and uses agricultural data is genuinely open right now. AI-augmented satellite imagery, EO-derived sampling frames, mobile phone data, and citizen-generated data are being recombined with traditional agricultural surveys, and what gets decided in the next few years about methods, standards, and governance will shape norms for a long time.
The thing to watch at the Festival & Expo is whether the sessions on methods and the sessions on financing and uptake are actually talking to each other. They tend not to — and the gap between them is where a lot of agricultural data work gets stuck.