Catherine Nakalembe

For Mary, it's as if all our technology disappears into a black hole.

And in my experience, drop predictions do not deliver pumps to the ground.

They produce bulletins.

Add to this complexity the fact that Mary has a small, irregular-sized field that doesn't fit our perfect pixels.

We are doing a terrible job mapping fields like Mary's.

In addition to this, the basic infrastructure required for us to improve our predictions and really bring them to the ground are largely missing for regions like where Mary is based.

This complex, messy middle is where all the

capabilities shrivel because it requires things that technology alone cannot provide.

For example, it would require partnering with an extension agent who not only delivers fertilizer, trains a farmer, and is an excellent data collector, but not replacing them.

It would also require presenting our information in a way that is accessible to a bank so that they can invest in a farmer like Mary who needs to plant next month.

So what is the path forward?

We can either expand this messy middle, this translation gap, by creating more tech-driven silos, or we can use our current capabilities and venture to connect them to real solutions on the ground.

To do this, there are five fundamental shifts that we will need to do.

The first is we need to focus on translating, and this would require that we're emphasizing reliability over perfection.

A model that is 80 percent accurate that delivers a pump to Mary is far better than one that's 90 percent accurate that never leaves a research paper or a dashboard.

It would require that not only do we fill that critical data gap so we are better able to predict and assess the conditions in Mary's field, we would need to make sure that our predictions can actually be evaluated.

Number three, it would require shifting how we finance climate response, focusing on predictions that will get proactive responses so that Mary is able to recover her investment.

Policies that encourage proactive planning are better than policies that emphasize emergency response.

This would also mean we incentivize how we can connect

our policymakers and people on the ground with the real advances our tools and technology is able to provide.