Rethinking approaches to achieve Sustainable Development Goals in an era of Smart Computing

We are becoming a digitally connected society opening up many new possibilities.  Our experience when trying to develop a mobile-based Smart Computing solution to a very common problem of overproduction in countries with small agricultural land holdings made us rethink how we can best use advances in ICT to archive Sustainable Development Goals. An efficient and effective food production system is the key to achieving the first 3 SDGs. Still, nearly 40% of the food produced gets wasted due to a range of reasons.  Though many Smart ICT based solutions have been developed to address some of these issues, none has been able to make a significant impact at a System level. We found the root cause is coordination failure at multiple levels and was able to develop a Digital Agribusiness Ecosystem to address this multi-level coordination failure among key stakeholders of the agriculture domain.  This system is now being deployed in India and Sri Lanka and trialed in Timor and Fiji. A modified version of the system to combat "Hidden Hunger" is trailed in South Africa and Malawi.  Insights gained from these projects have enabled us to rethink how we can best achieve SDGs in an era of Smart Computing and enabled us to develop a framework to guide such developments.