Where to find free data?

This pages links you up with portals that give you access to data relevant to agriculture and rural development for free

Geographical datasets

for all kind of data produced by the UN and CGIAR system
http://www.fao.org/geonetwork/srv/en/main.home

USaid (infrastructure and other base maps for many developing countries)
https://gistdata.itos.uga.edu/
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AuApi46szKw4dDhVM1dZNmpld3dIQWdRS2NnRkZDQWc#gid=46 

Geo-wiki with livestock data from ILRI and crowed sourced cropland map
www.geo-wiki.org

The Humanitarian Data Exchange portal :
https://data.humdata.org/


Newest population layers : World pop with upcoming new poverty layers 
http://www.worldpop.org.uk/

Forest area (Maryland)
http://www.earthenginepartners.appspot.com/science-2013-global-forest/download.html  

Admin boundaries
http://www.gadm.org/
or use GAUL from FAO (restricted access)
for Ethiopia low level admin unit

Urban extent 
http://nelson.wisc.edu/sage/data-and-models/schneider.php

CGIAR consortium
http://www.cgiar-csi.org/data 

ILRI (livestock and much more for developing countries)
http://data.ilri.org/geoportal/catalog/main/home.page

SPAM crop data
http://mapspam.info/data/

ICRAF geoportal
http://landscapeportal.org/

IGAD (livestock and much more in Ethiopia)
http://geonode.igad.int/ 

SEDAC, the Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center
http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/collection/anthromes#data

IIASA (harmonised soil)
http://webarchive.iiasa.ac.at/Research/LUC/External-World-soil-database/HTML/index.html?sb=1

European commission (many global dataset)
http://dma.jrc.it/map/

Copernicus land services for satellite related products
http://land.copernicus.eu/global

famine early warning system
http://www.fews.net/Pages/default.aspx?l=en

center for hazard and risk research
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/chrr/research/hotspots/coredata.html

Land use
modis
global land cover network 
esa

wind in Ethiopia
http://en.openei.org/datasets/node/611

open street map
http://www.openstreetmap.org/

UNEP database (with almost all other UN data in a user friendly database)
http://geodata.grid.unep.ch

harvestchoice (crop data)
http://harvestchoice.org/products/map

more European Data
http://www.edenextdata.com/

University of Wisconsin overview of free data
http://www.sage.wisc.edu/mapsdatamodels.html

Biosphere Atlas (global environmental datasets)
http://nelson.wisc.edu/sage/data-and-models/atlas/

African soil map at 1 km resolution
http://www.isric.org/data/soil-property-maps-africa-1-km

Global agri-ecological zones
http://www.fao.org/nr/gaez/en/

Water territories, maritime boundaries
http://www.fao.org/geonetwork/srv/en/main.home?uuid=ac02a460-da52-11dc-9d70-0017f293bd28
http://openstreetmapdata.com/data/water-reduced-polygons
http://www.marineregions.org/downloads.php

Copernicus data
http://www.copernicus-masters.com/data-access/



Swissdata
http://www.geocat.ch
http://www2.unil.ch/sig/geocatalog/

you find more and  follow this blog :
http://free-gis-data.blogspot.com/

Other data 

soil and water conservation database
http://cdewocat.unibe.ch/wocatQA/SearchApproach.php

Ethiopian rural economic survey
http://www.csae.ox.ac.uk/datasets/Ethiopia-ERHS/ERHS-main.html

IFPRI dataset
http://www.ifpri.org/datasets

All available data from Kenya including some of the census 2009 data
https://opendata.go.ke/

DHS (demographic health surveys) data
www.dhsprogram.com/ 

Gender data
http://www.genderindex.org/

feed data base
http://www.feedipedia.org/

please contact me if you have more suggestions