At COP30, the Gates Foundation announced a $1.4 billion investment to expand access to evidence-backed tools to help farmers across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia adapt to extreme weather. This funding will expand technologies and approaches already showing results, such as digital advisory services. Mobile apps, SMS, and other platforms can deliver timely, tailored information to help farmers make informed planting decisions and manage risk.
The use of digital advisory services was successfully deployed by the Indian government this summer, in partnership with the UChicago Human-Centered Weather Forecasts (HCF) initiative and AIM for Scale, when38 million farmers received AI-powered weather forecasts through SMS. The project is a testament to the importance of such approaches.
AIM for Scale announced its commitment to expand such uses of digital advisory services. The organization, partially backed by the Gates Foundation, committed to delivering science-based insights—such as weather forecasts—to 100 million farmers across Africa, Asia, and Latin America by 2030. For example, in Ethiopia, AIM for Scale will work with the Agricultural Transformation Institute (ATI) to provide tailored advisories to more than seven million farmers through the country’s trusted 8028 Hotline. Beginning in 2026, AIM for Scale will expand collaboration with multilateral development banks and governments in eleven additional countries to embed digital advisory services into national agricultural systems. The HCF will serve as a key technical partner in these efforts.
“Last-mile delivery is where digital advisory services succeed or fail,” said HCF Co-Director Amir Jina, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago and chair of the AIM for Scale Weather Forecasts for Farmers Technical Panel, speaking from COP30. “We need to rigorously test what works for farmers in real conditions—how messages are delivered, understood, and acted upon. The more we learn from those interactions, the more effective and scalable digital systems become.”
The efforts build off HCF’s work with UChicago’s AI for Climate initiative, the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence and AIM for Scale to provide training to meteorological and agricultural agencies in low- and middle-income countries to strengthen their ability to use AI-driven weather forecasting.
Learn more about the efforts to expand digital advisory services.