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Challenge Timeline

Event

  • Registrations
  • Screening/Selection of Ideas
  • Virtual Opening / FireSide Chat(feat Industry Experts)
  • Hackaton Event
  • Announcement of Winners / Closing

Begins

  • 6th September, 2021
  • 24th September, 2021

  • 1st October, 2021

  • 2nd October, 2021
  • 3rd October, 2021

Ends

  • 24th September, 2021
  • 27th September, 2021

  • 1st October, 2021

  • 3rd October, 2021
  • 3rd October, 2021

About the Challenge &
Why you should join

The Youth Empowerment Project & HackWeakEnd presents The AgriHack Challenge, an EU Funded Hybrid Hackathon to create solutions that will drive Socio-Economic impact, with the aim of facilitating the development of successful and innovative digital technologies to drive value for the whole spectrum of the Agriculture Value Chain amidst technology infrastructure challenges in the Gambia. The agricultural sector is the most important sector of the Gambian economy, contributing 32% of the gross domestic product, providing employment and income for 80% of the population, and accounting for 70% of the country's foreign exchange earnings2. The AgriHack Challenge was rolled out as a "Think & Solve" space where people can ideate, experiment and build solutions to help address the agriculture value chain problems. This will be achieved by re-designing how farmers , especially smallholders, traders and consumers adopt and interact with digital platforms.
So what is the reward for participating in this Hybrid hackathon?

  • The real reward is driving meaningful Socio-Economic impact and seeing small holder farmers,communities and livelihood get better, not forgetting commercial farmers.
  • The Winning Team gets $3,000 in funding to scale up and build the idea/solution
  • The Top 3 Winning Teams get intensive business coaching (with YEP’s worldclass Consultants)
  • The Top 3 Winning Teams get 1 Year Free Licence to any of JETBRAINS Worldclass Desktop tools(includes 10 IDEs, 2 profilers, and 3 extensions)
  • Linkages with YEP's partners in the winners’ challenge.


Thematic Focus Areas

The focus areas and themes are based on value chain analysis done by International Trade Centre's Consultants and also from the GSMA AgriTech Toolkit for the Digitisation of Agricultural Value Chains. More thorough focus are outlined below:

1. ITC specific challenges – Horticulture

Would you like to work on a horticultural challenge?
The International Trade centre is starting to implement a project on Covid Recovery. Profit from insights collected from stakeholders and project staff and help to design a technical solution for specific real-life problems of Gambian farmers.

  • Rural horticultural farmers need a way to reach potential customers as they currently lack access to market information, limiting their sales and productivity. At the same time, buyers (hotels, hospitals, etc.) need a new way to source qualitative and affordable horticultural produce because they currently cannot get enough domestic supplies.
  • The government of The Gambia needs a sustainable way to collect horticultural data (production & prices) for planning and policy because their current approach of collecting data through extension workers is under-collecting and too costly.

2. PRE-FARMING

    PLANNING: Solutions that will help in planning the agriculture lifecycle
  • Help farmers plan what and know when to plant and also Adapt to climate change
  • Tighten relationship with buyers, processors and other stakeholders
  • Provide data for farmers to make business decisions on cash flow and maximizing profit
    INPUTS: Solutions focusing on input to the production process
  • Increase access to quality inputs while Reducing Costs, Counterfeits and risks for farmers and buyers
  • Enable farmers/sellers to know demand in advance
  • Provide convenient and secure ways for farmers to purchase, save, and receive credit inputs

3. FARMING

    ON-FARM PRODUCTION: Solutions focusing on actual farming processes
  • Help extension services reach more farmers
  • Provide timely reminders/alerts
  • Increase precision and/or adaptability of farming interventions and crop choices through applied data
    STORAGE: Solutions focusing on storage of produce
  • Improve links between farmers and processors
  • Inform harvest practices to reduce post-harvest losses, Reduce post-harvest loss .
  • Monitor storage conditions

4. POST-FARMING

    POST-HARVEST: Solutions focusing on after harvest processes
  • Increase farmer negotiating power by providing market prices
  • Track provenance for supply chain optimization and grading
    TRANSPORTATION: Solutions focusing on moving of produce from one point to the other
  • Reduce costs of transport while increasing the choice of different types of transport for farmers
  • Increase access to timely information so that farmers know if and when transport is arriving
    ACCESS TO MARKETS: Solutions focusing on market linkages
  • Increase ability of smallholder farmers to sell to larger markets by allowing buyers to track crops to source (certification and provenance)
  • Increase market information available to farmers so that they have more choices

Eligibility.
Who Can Participate ?

The AgriHack Challenge is open to all Residents Of The Gambia and Gambians in the Diaspora.
It is mandatory that solutions developed be deployed in The Gambia and address Gambia's problems.

We welcome not only tech based solutions but non-tech solutions too, but we will require non-tech based solutions to have a tech face to it. You do not need to worry to much, as you can join with a techie or you can also be linked to a techie if your idea is chosen.

Challenge Requirements

WHAT DOES A SUCCESSFUL PROJECT LOOK LIKE?
[Please note that, Production-ready projects will not be favored over proof-of-concepts. The judges will focus on submissions that have the strongest potential impact on the solutions that will better the Agriculture Value Chain. ]

  • Production-ready solution for immediate impact: These will be projects that are ready to hit the ground running in communities.
  • Ship an awesome proof-of-concept with lots of potential: These will be conceptual projects with bucket-loads of promise.

Highlights

Since this Hackathon is value focused and driven, the 3days of the hackathon will require dedication of time from you and your team.

  • The hackathon shall be physical and tackle issues related to sustainability in Agricultural Value Chain system in The Gambia using Technology, it might go fully online if the effects of Covid-19 becomes serious.
  • Teams can be a maximum of 4, able to work remotely and possibly physically and share resources
  • Work should be pushed to Github, and commits should be done with comments as many times within the hackathon period.
  • Heroku or other PAAS or CAP(cloud application platform) can be used to push solutions

Project Submission(Might change depending on the final format, if physical or online).
What we require from you

It is very necessary to follow the guidelines for submission of your project, anything contrary might not give the judges enough standpoint to grade your project well enough.

  • A live link to the Project hosted online via a Cloud Aplication Platform or PAAS like Heroku
  • A link to your code, hosted on GitHub or other code repository and ensure the link is available for judges and other people to view.
  • Create a two-minute video walk-through of your solution and upload to YouTube or Vimeo, and include the link as part of your submission

Judging Criteria

What judges will be looking out for.

  • Potential Impact/Value: Will the project be able to reach a point of completion from a technical perspective, and does it have the potential for positive impact to drive change in the Agricultural value chain?
  • Technical Feasibility: Is technology being implemented appropriately to solve the problem at hand? Looking at the technology implementation, is it possible to accomplish this project in order to help solve challenges relating to Agriculture value chains with urgency and impact?
  • Functionality and Meaningfulness: Is the project purposefully solving a real problem or taking advantage of an opportunity? Is the project submitted going to have meaningful value once fully completed?

FireSide Chat +
Virtual Opening.

At the Virtual opening of the AgriHack Challenge is the FireSide Chat. The essence is to draw up conversation on "How AgriTech and AgriBusiness drive Socio-Economic Development".
Date: Friday 1st October, 2021
Time: 4:00pm GMT / 9:30pm IST / 11:00am CST
Speakers from
-PayPal: World Leader in Payments
-Farmcrowdy: Foremost AgriTech Company in Africa
-MoneyFarm: Foremost AgriBusiness firm in the Gambia
Register for the fireside chat+ virtual opening at https://bit.ly/agrihackfschat

Register for The AgriHack Challenge

We appreciate the time you have spent here thus far. Please use the form below to register. We expect some form of commitment to make this challenge a success, please look at the event schedule and be sure it works well for you. SLACK,ZOOM & GITHUB are the major platforms we will be using for this Challenge(if we have to go fully online). Incase the embedded form does not show up or slow to show up, please use the link below
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THE AGRIHACK CHALLENGE

The AgriHack Challenege is organized and supported by: