Yang Fan: Promoting digital innovation and rural development

Editor’s note

Tsinghua University plays an active role in promoting the SDGs by nurturing innovative talents, enhancing research, among many other important ways.

Yang Fan, a Tsinghua alumnus and junior consultant at International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), dedicated himself to the development of rural areas.

Benefiting from his expertise in artificial intelligence (AI) and data science, Fan supports the organization on statistical analysis and ICT development for the IFAD Omnidata project. Let’s read his story.

Yang Fan

“There are always brand-new challenges and surprises during my experience in international organizations, especially when you try to connect your future career with the global development”, says Yang Fan, a Tsinghua alumnus working for the (IFAD), a United Nations Specialized Agency with its headquarter in Rome, Italy.

Starting his new career in 2022, Fan is currently serving as a junior consultant at the ICT Division of IFAD.

“It’s amazing to take advantage of my ICT expertise in artificial intelligence and statistical analysis within the context of rural development.

“This is the main focus of IFAD’s investment operation, to align my work with an overall vision of the organization to eradicate hunger and end poverty in the rural areas,” Fan said.

Fan’s journey within the international organizations started from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).

In 2020, AIIB’s Implementation Monitoring Department (IMD) was recruiting short term consultants from Tsinghua University with expertise in statistics and text analytic. As a master’s student in the Department of Electronic Engineering, Fan submitted his resume and qualified for the technical interview. 

“Back then, I had never imagined that I could manage to get a position in an International Financial Institution (IFI), even though I’ve been dreaming for a career path in the international organizations for a long time. Therefore, without hesitation, I decided to take the chance to join AIIB,” Fan said.

During Fan’s experience in the AIIB, he carried on the development of the MDB Lessons’ Viewer toolkit in AIIB, which aims to assist project team leaders to efficiently learn distilled experiences from other MDBs, collecting public reports and project information with web spiders, and conducting data analysis with machine learning algorithms.

He also assisted with the development of the AIIB Investment Operation Dashboard, that aims to provide an overview of rolling pipeline and projects, conducting statistical analysis on pipeline data, and designing visualization application.

“The prototype development with simple use cases builds trust among different divisions and teams regarding the data sharing, which consequently establishes a solid foundation for the digital innovation in an international organization,” Fan said.

In 2021, Fan participated in the UN internship program sponsored by the Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC), while he completed his internship in IFAD remotely in the China Office. After the internship and the cooling period that follows, Fan re-joined IFAD in 2022 as a junior consultant. During his consultancy, he has contributed to the statistical analysis of the global food systems, with the Large Language Models (LLMs) integrated into the analysis to better assess the relevance between the different topics of food systems and the specific policy frameworks.

“I learned a lot from colleagues from all over the world, learning the process of rural development in their countries, and how we can support rural transformation and climate change adaptation,” Fan said.

Speaking of how the digital innovation could contribute to the rural transformation, Fan gave an example of using the Geography Information System (GIS) in identifying digital property rights to land in the rural areas of Western African countries.

“In many countries in West Africa, the ownership of land is unclear due to the historical legacy of colonization.

“With the block-chain technology, the digital property rights system could be established to allow the farmers to cross-verify the ownership of a piece of land and receive the digital proof of title to the land. 

IFAD’s geospatial technologies for land recordation

“This system is particularly meaningful for agricultural development in Africa as it ensures the smooth climate adaptation from nomadic herding to farming,” Fan said.

As another example, Fan has been currently working with the Omnidata team of IFAD on developing web services, which allows the people in the rural area to access AI-based image classification services (e.g. pest classification, plant disease identification, etc.) through widely used mobile apps (e.g. WhatsApp) with acceptable costs, which makes sure that even the people from the remote rural area can also benefit from the advanced ICT services.

Fan has been selected to join the United Nations Young Professionals Programme (UN YPP) in the Statistics & Data Science track, with possibility to start his new journey in the UN Secretariat in the next few years. “I will further explore my career path in the international organizations. Even though we still have a long way to go to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), it’s definitely worthy of contributing my time and becoming a part of the process, to make the world a better place than where we found it,” Fan said.

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TsinghuaRen | Yang Fan: Promoting digital innovation and rural development in IFAD

Writer: Guo Wenqing

Editors: Huang Fei, Maria Vula

Designer: Guo Wenqing

Reviewers: Xu Liang, Lin Yuan