Boston-based TomorrowNow has announced a $5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to expand access to weather and climate data for small-scale farmers across Africa.

The grant will bolster the climate-tech nonprofit’s Osiris program, which provides research organizations, NGOs, farmer cooperatives, and government agencies in Africa with access to localized weather forecasts and historical climate datasets as part of a toolkit for helping small-scale farmers adapt to climate change, improve crop yields, and build local prosperity. TomorrowNow and its partners, which include the CGIAR agriculture research consortium, aim to work with 20 million small-scale farmers over the next three years. In 2021, a $2 million grant from the foundation helped launch the program which has, to date, reached a million farmers across the continent.

“[Osiris] has empowered CGIAR by providing direct access to a comprehensive and localized historical reanalysis dataset for East Africa,” said Kauê de Sousa, a scientist at Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, a CGIAR partner. “This has shown the potential to significantly enhance the outcomes of seed breeding analytics…enabling us to refine our methodologies and substantially improve the…effectiveness of our work.”

(Photo credit: Getty Images/Armand Burger)