ISLAMABAD: A faculty member of the International Islamic University Islamabad (IIUI) has been part of the team declared the winner of the WaPOR Hackathon 2026, an international competition on the use of satellite data in agricultural water management, organised by the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education in the Netherlands.
Dr. Bushra Ghaffar, Assistant Professor of Environmental Science at IIUI, was a member of Team CaneWise, which was selected first from among 47 teams drawn from countries across the world. Six teams reached the final round, and the winner was announced at a live session on 27 August.
The competition was organised in collaboration with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), with support from the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Its theme, “From Tools to Decisions”, asked participants to show how freely available satellite data could change decisions actually taken by institutions on the ground.
The winning entry, CaneWise, addresses a problem common across South Asian sugarcane belts. Sugar mills are required each season to survey their cane supply areas and forecast crushing volumes, but a small number of field officers must cover many thousands of smallholder plots. Inspections therefore follow a fixed rotation rather than responding to need, and water stress is often confirmed only after yield has been lost.
CaneWise uses FAO’s WaPOR satellite data on evapotranspiration and biomass, updated every ten days, to rank village clusters by the severity of water stress and by whether that stress can still be reversed, so that field officers are directed where a visit can still change the outcome of the season. The award citation described it as the solution judged most effective at turning satellite data into decisions that reach end users.
“The aim is to get more crop from the same water rather than to draw more water,” she said. “In canal systems under increasing stress, that distinction matters. The satellite establishes priority; the field officer establishes fact.”
Water scarcity is among Pakistan’s most pressing long-term challenges, and sugarcane is one of the country’s most water-intensive crops. The approach demonstrated in the competition is designed to be transferable to canal command areas in the Indus Basin.
Team CaneWise also included Dr. Fawzia Tarannum (Founder & CEO, EarthWise Nexa LLP), Ms. Niyati Mehrotra (Co-founder & Director, EarthWise Nexa LLP), and Dr. Sherly M. A. (Founder & Director, Mazkon HydroAnalytics)
