Eight Caribbean Technology and Innovation Hubs have been selected to participate in the Agrihack Talent Caribbean competition, which seeks to support the development of ICT innovations and entrepreneurship in agriculture by young tech talent. The event is being staged by the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (), in collaboration with institutions including the Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute (CARDI), the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) and ConnectiMass Hub (cHub).
The hubs/partners selected are: the Community Hub Corporation (Trinidad and Tobago), Slashroots Foundation (Jamaica), Create Caribbean (Dominica), Quintessence Consulting Inc (St Kitts), National Council for Science and Technology (Barbados), Software Engineering Lab, Department of Computing, UWI (Jamaica), Telesur Multimedia Innovation Laboratory (Suriname) and Noviate Creative Labs Limited (Trinidad and Tobago). See this post for more about these institutions.
Private, public sector and non-government run innovation or entrepreneurship hubs/labs/communities (including university labs) were invited to express interest in being partners, that will nominate and support teams to the finals of the Agrihack Talent Caribbean competition in Suriname.
These institutions are charged with staging national hackathons or competitive coding selection events. The winning teams from the national events will move on to the regional finals that will be held during the Caribbean Week of Agriculture (CWA) to be held in Suriname from 6 – 12 October 2014. An incubation process will follow for winners to fine-tune their products and favour actual roll-out.
Launched in East Africa, now in the Caribbean!
The Agrihack Championship, which focused on East Africa, took the form of a regional tournament, with key stakeholders involved in the preliminary phase to identify the agricultural challenges needing solutions from ICT applications. A series of national selection events was held before the nine most promising entries, drawn from six countries, were invited to the finals, held in Kigali, Rwanda on November 7, 2013, as part of CTA’s 2013 ICT4Ag Conference. All the entries were from young people interested in developing ICT solutions for agriculture. Many of them are still students.
The agricultural challenges
Challenges for the Agrihack Talent Caribbean competition will be in relation to: Market access/Entry; Access to Production Information and Knowledge for soils, weather and pest management notably; Collaboration application for farmers; Climate change and water shortage issues; Agricultural API; Praedial larceny in the Caribbean, etc.
Prizes and rewards
At the regional level, national winners (named “finalists”) will compete for seed grants amounting to EUR 5,000, EUR 4,000 and EUR 3,000 for the first, second and third overall positions respectively. The hubs supporting the three regional winning teams will also receive a EUR 3,000 matching grant to undertake post-competition incubation and business support to the winning teams for a period of 6 months. Interventions provided during the incubation period will include support to finalise development of winning solutions. The financial estimation of the direct benefits to be earned by the overall winner (cash, incubation and other rewards) is above EUR15,000.
At the finals in Suriname, teams will receive coaching, mentorship and valuable feedback from players in the ICT and agriculture sector. This is in addition to the time allocated for further development and refinement of their solutions. The finalists will also have the chance to network with participants of the Caribbean Week of Agriculture 2014 event in Suriname. This will offer opportunity for the developers of agriculture solution to better understand their customer needs and establish key industry and institutional connections.
One representative of the selected hub/lab that would have nominated the winning team will also attend that meeting. CTA will facilitate airline reservations, accommodation and local transport for two members of national winning teams, as well as for the representatives of the hubs for their stay in Suriname.
The judging panel for the final regional competition will be drawn from three domain expertise areas of agriculture, ICT and business. The judging criteria to be used at the final competition will be circulated to participating hubs in advance for use in nominating teams.
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