January the 12th, 2023 - Eight platforms have been developed for Croatian village digitalisation as the country hopes to help more rural areas catch up and transform as we go forward.

As Josipa Ban/Poslovni Dnevnik writes, the CEKOM Food&Rural project, which will enable the Croatian village digitalisation and the overall digital transformation of more rural areas, was successfully completed recently. According to InfoDom, the company that developed as many as eight platforms as part of the wider project, all of them will be free for all of their users.

"Our experts and partners in the project have successfully realised the expected outcomes of the Nikola Tesla Innovation Centre. This is in relation to good practices for the application of digital technologies in agriculture and rural development that will be available to 170,000 OPGs (family farms) and small and medium-sized companies that will be able to digitise their business processes," said Boris Blumenschein, head of the CEKOM project, who is also a member of the InfoDom Management Board.

Cooperation to find a proper solution to Croatian village digitalisation and allowing rural areas to keep up

This project is worth a massive 13.14 million kuna and was co-financed from the European Regional Development Fund in the amount of 7.7 million kuna. It should contribute to greater competitiveness of entities based in the country's more rural areas, accelerate social development and work to preserve the populations living in rural areas. Villages and more rural parts of the country are the primary victims of the demographic crisis, and their local populations are increasingly emigrating due to worsening living conditions and difficulties finding secure jobs.

This project in which, together with InfoDom, the Institute for Informatics Activities of Croatia (ZIH), the Faculty of Organisation and Informatics (FOI) and the Nikola Tesla Innovation Centre all participated, resulted in the creation of eight brand new products, all of which form something unique and are available for free use.

An IoT platform, a decision support system, a food distribution platform, an ecosystem development portal, a checklist and self-check system, a knowledge base, a BigData platform and a healthcare and rural tourism portal have now all been successfully developed. Registration on these platforms, the aforementioned groups assure, is simple and quick.

Food processing and distribution

"Through the research and development activities carried out within the scope of this project, a digital ecosystem of agrotechnological solutions was created for the successful commercialisation of CEKOM results related to the development of mechanisms for the more efficient use of resources, the application of knowledge and innovation in food production, processing and distribution, and the system will continuously connect mutually complementary groups of companies, individuals or things that share standardised solutions,'' they explained from InfoDom.

All of the developed platforms should result in numerous positive outcomes when it comes to Croatian village digitalisation and allowing rural areas to keep up, from the advancement of technological development, commercialisation, the application of various innovations, the branding of the food industry and other local products through the application of innovative design and promotional activities.

Ultimately, all this should strengthen the competitiveness of the food industry in rural areas of Croatia. All that remains is for OPGs and small and medium-sized enterprises to start using all these solutions.

For more, check out our dedicated business section.

ZAGREB, 18 July, 2021 - According to the 2011 census, as many as 150 settlements and villages in Croatia have become uninhabited, and most of such unpopulated places are in the municipality of Delnice in the Rijeka hinterland and in Karlovac and Istria counties, the Večernji List daily reported on Sunday.

The daily newspaper carried excerpts from a monograph on now-vacant settlements prepared by researchers Vlatka Dugački, Lana Peternel, Filip Škiljan.

Dugački was quoted by the VL daily as saying that uninhabited settlements and towns "are a complex social phenomenon".

According to the 2011 census, the highest number of abandoned settlements was registered in the mountainous region of Gorski Kotar (a wider Delnice area). Karlovac County ranked second, and was followed by Istria and Požega-Slavonia counties.

For instance in Primorje-Gorski Kotar County, nearly 50 settlements have become "ghost towns", and of them 30 were around Delnice. In Karlovac County, a score of settlements have become unpopulated, and in Istria 15.

No abandoned settlements in north of Croatia

On the other hand, in the northern counties -- Međimurje, Varaždin and Koprivnica-Križevci -- there were no abandoned settlements according to the 2011 census.

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