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With research staff from more than 70 countries, and offices across the globe, IFPRI provides research-based policy solutions to sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition in developing countries.

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David Spielman

David Spielman is the director of IFPRI’s Innovation Policy and Scaling Unit and has been with the institute since 2004. His research agenda covers a range of topics including agriculture and rural development policy; agricultural science, technology, and innovation; plant genetic resources and seed systems; agricultural extension and advisory services; and community-driven rural development.

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Leveraging Automatic Speech Recognition and Farmer-Generated Data for Insight, Inclusion, and Impact

Co-organized by IFPRI and CGIAR Program/accelerator Digital Transformation
Webinar Series – AI for Food Systems Research

May 1, 2026

  • 9:30 – 10:30 am (America/New_York)
  • 3:30 – 4:30 pm (Europe/Amsterdam)
  • 7:00 – 8:00 pm (Asia/Kolkata)
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As speech recognition and mobile data collection tools mature, increasing attention is turning to a critical next question: how can farmer-generated data be meaningfully used to inform research, programs, and policy? This session builds directly on earlier discussions of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for agriculture by focusing on the applications, utility, and downstream impacts of collecting large volumes of farmer voice data.

The webinar will open with a presentation from Donna-lee Ginsberg Chief of Staff and Benard Okasi Research Director of GeoPoll, who will discuss the range of applications they are exploring using voice and survey data collected from farmers. The presentation will highlight how these data are being analyzed, integrated into decision-making processes, and translated into actionable insights across agricultural and development programs.

Violet Lasdun, research consultant at ABC and PhD Candidate at LSE, will then present work demonstrating how ASR can enable more participatory approaches to agricultural innovation. Drawing on her experience in seed systems, she will show how digital tools and feedback mechanisms have allowed farmers to actively participate in seed breeding and selection processes—shifting farmers from data sources to co-creators of agricultural knowledge.

The session will be discussed by Marieke Meeske of the Zero Hunger Lab, who will contextualize these examples within broader debates on the impacts of NLP and AI in food systems, drawing on insights from her recent research on how language technologies shape knowledge production, power, and inclusion.

Together, the session explores how voice and language data can move beyond extraction toward inclusive, farmer-centred innovation.

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  • Eliot Jones-Garcia, Senior Research Analyst, IFPRI; PhD Candidate, Wageningen University

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