Alliance Bioversity-CIAT trains Kenya's statistics bureau in spatial analytics

The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT has run the first in a series of knowledge-exchange sessions for staff of the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS), aiming to link official statistics with spatial intelligence for policy. It was delivered through the CGIAR Policy Innovations Program and CGIAR Climate Action.

Chun Song of the Alliance's PISA team led the training, with input from James Gachanja of KIPPRA and Abhijeet Mishra of IFPRI.

Topics included mapping future food demand by crop alongside climate hazard risk, using satellite data for finer crop mapping, and producing local-level maps of socioeconomic and food security indicators. Participants also looked at building capacity on environmental SDG indicators, including mountain green cover.

Why it matters: Embedding spatial analytics in national statistics offices can make official data more local and usable for food security and climate planning. For Kenya, it links research tools such as crop mapping and SDG indicators to routine statistical production.