There is no gainsaying that Africa has a lot of problems. But Africa also possesses one of the highest populations of young, smart, and vibrant youths. Hence a team of Harvard Educators decided to create a fellowship called Innovate for Africa. I was lucky to be among the 2021 cohort. Part of the program outline includes a hackathon where we engage in a design thinking process to create a start-up to solve a persistent problem. This process birthed Agronovator; A climate-smart solution for agriculture in Nigeria.
A hackathon is simply an exhibition of a solution to a defined problem or problems. The Innovate for Africa hackathon outline involves the use of a design thinking process to formulate a strategic action plan for a problem. The design process is a five-step process that encompasses empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test.
The 3-week hackathon process sought to implement these design thinking strategies. At first, we pitched a problem and thus began the first stage of the process.
Empathize
This process involves performing interviews that are personalized and streamlined towards the users. In essence, you wear your users’ shoes to evaluate their pain points since the problem you are trying to solve rarely yours. Utilizing empathy ensures that you are not emotionally connected to the problem, thereby giving you an informed framework of the problem from the user’s perspective.
Our problem sector is agriculture; hence, we interviewed farmers and conducted primary market research to evaluate their pain points. I wrote about the market research last week, and you can read it here.
Define
In defining the problem, we streamline the problems into “how might we” statements. This measure ensures that we create a human-centered solution rather than a business-centered one. We created 3 “how might we” questions for our hackathon group based on the insights we got from our interviews with various farmers during our primary market research.
Ideate
Nigeria’s population is estimated to be above 200 million people. Of that population, a paltry 12,293,000 is involved in active farming. It gets worse! Of that 12 million farmers, only about 5 million practice commercial agriculture. Hence most of our farmers are engaged in subsistent agriculture, meaning farm produce is not sufficient for the food demands of 200 million people. A more debilitating fact is 80% of those subsistent farmers are in rural areas. Meaning they lack sufficient access to roads, internet, electricity, and other amenities that make commercial agriculture feasible.
Prototype
Behold the USSD agronovator! A simple yet ingenious solution to the agricultural deficiency in Nigeria. My team designed a farmer-centric solution that will connect farmers to much-needed access to machinery, weather and climate information, sustainable farming practices, and ancillary farm services like storage and harvesting.
We decided to engage the USSD technology because our market research revealed that most farmers in Nigeria do not have ready access to internet services and aren’t in tune with smart technology. Hence to create a solution they can use, we need to provide them with something simple, and in a language, they can understand. The USSD agronovator would have language choices for the indigenous languages in Nigeria.
The process is straightforward; the farmer dials a ussd code *122# and then follow the prompts for the various services he requires.
We aim to provide farmers with machinery and services that would boost crop production and gradually integrate them into commercial agriculture. A peculiar service is the collaborative hiring scheme, where farmers can collectively hire a tractor and use it within a stipulated time on their various farms. This scheme is, however, dependent on the proximity of farm clusters. Other services rendered by the agronovator include weather information, post-harvest storage facilities, village savings, and loans association (VSLA), and e-extension services.
The hackathon process was an engaging and intensive process that taught me critical skills like collaboration and creativity. The finale was the pitch day, where we presented our ideas to a group of Harvard alumni and educators. My initial anxiety was replaced by anxiousness after doing many mirror practices on my pitch. We delegated the presentation among our group members and gave an overall successful business pitch!
The hackathon process inspired the conviction that Africa’s problems can be resolved if we leverage indigenous knowledge and put its youth to work! The agronovator is a workable solution for agricultural commercialization in Africa, and we are currently testing the project via a pilot program.
Beyond the idea, a host of other equally ingenious and innovative solutions were proffered by other teammates. At the end of the hackathon, my hope for an independent, sufficient, and sustainable Africa was renewed. And I believe we can all achieve the Africa we want by engaging the youths in innovation processes.