Increasing Female STEM Participation with BeSci

UN Women's Buy from Women platform, under the Global Flagship Programme on Climate Smart Agriculture, gives women farmers easier access to land, information, markets and finance. The platform plays a dual role: it gives women access to pertinent information (prices, inputs, financing) while helping them establish themselves as legitimate commercial entities with records (land, yields, track record of investments and repayments) to secure their financial future or access new markets. Unlike most market platforms, which are built around the needs of buyers or companies tracking their suppliers, Buy from Women is designed directly around women farmers' needs. It uses an open-source Enterprise Resource Planning system that covers multiple functions and can integrate third-party apps, and pilots are based on value-chain-specific analysis so that features reflect local needs and context. The cloud-based platform is available on web and app in multiple languages, can be customised to any commodity and business process in the local ecosystem, and generates rich data to support decision-making and profitability.

Low-tech hydroponic units help Sahrawi refugees grow fresh green animal fodder locally, strengthening food security in the community. Hydroponics is a soilless cultivation technique that enables plant growth in non-fertile, arid or urban areas with limited space. It is cost- and time-efficient, saving up to 90% of water and 75% of space compared with traditional agriculture, and allows faster food production all year round. In the refugee camps in Tindouf, south-western Algeria, WFP and local experts developed a low-tech system to grow barley as animal fodder, increasing refugees' access to milk and meat. Building on this pilot, WFP's H2Grow initiative brings low-tech, climate-smart hydroponic solutions to vulnerable communities and by 2021 had expanded to 21 countries, including Chad, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kenya, Libya, Nigeria, Palestine, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

SCOUT uses optimization AI to enhance global food sourcing and delivery planning for WFP's supply chain. It optimizes complex supply chain planning by modeling WFP's global supply chain network, focusing on upstream operations up to recipient countries. It provides data-driven insights to improve decision-making in sourcing and delivery planning for HQ core units and regional bureaux.

PEOPLE is a project of the World Weather Research Programe (WWRP). We aim to engage an inclusive range of people in developing a contextual understanding of priorities and experiences that ensure continuous improvement in the implementation of equitable and sustainable early warning systems for all. Building on insights from previous projects, PEOPLE will recognize the elements of an effectively expanded Early Warning System (EWS) and analyze the structural and social processes needed to support this. It will acknowledge cultural and knowledge systems as well as governance dimensions, focusing on science for and with policy and practice.