The Greenathon Executive Summary The Greenathon was a 2-day event curated by the Green Innovation Centre Nigeria to identify and detail innovative ideas in response to frequent issues faced in the agricultural value chains covered by the programme. Prior to the event, all stakeholders who were invited had the opportunity to submit innovation challenges they find important to focus on in a survey across four areas (training & extension, market information and linkages, policy and enabling environment, agroprocessing); more than 40 responses were received and further prioritized in the first part of the stakeholder meeting. After the first half-day of the Greenathon, the group of more than 110 stakeholders had agreed on five challenges they deemed the most important to be tackled with innovation:
Challenge 1: Improving market access using ICT to avoid low profits and post-harvest losses Challenge 2: Introducing efficient processing equipment that reduces post-harvest losses and helps produce high-quality products Challenge 3: Introducing a specialized quality control body for agriculture to improve and harmonise standards Challenge 4: Improving business management skills of extension agents and smallholders to profitably manage and scale farms Challenge 5: Introducing quality seeds and disease control approaches to augment the yield and profit of smallholder farmers.
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Participants formed groups of 7-8 people each to work on one of the five challenges in order to come up with a compelling innovative solution to the problem; in order to do so, they received expert input on two important topics (1) how to leverage simple technology, such as SurveyMonkey or Squarespace, to enable their idea and (2) how to build good customer journeys to make the idea robust. In a two-stage pitching process, three innovation teams, Agrobiz Service Enterprise; Irish Potato 5X and Farm Mart, were shortlisted for the “grand finale” to present their prototype of the innovation in the plenary:
Agrobiz service enterprise, presented a solution to enable service providers, offer timely distribution of quality seed and effective farm management for smallholders Irish Potato 5X, solution seeks to introduce quality seeds & disease control approaches to augment yield & profit of smallholder farmers Farm Mart’s innovation was to facilitate communication between farmers and off-takers.
These three teams were given the opportunity to convince a team of four judges of their idea – the audience could vote for their preferred idea which counted 50% to the final decision. Farm Mart won the competition by a large margin and was awarded the first prize of the Greenathon, an innovation lab with a small group of people to kick-start the idea into a full pilot is on the way. The pictures and video documentation from the Greenathon is available on the Green Innovation Centre website: www.greeninnovation-nigeria.net
Contact: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH Green Innovation Centres for the Agriculture and Food Sector Programme (GIAE) – Nigeria 4 Nelson Mandela Street, Asokoro, Abuja, E-Mail: greeninnovation-nigeria@giz.de www.greeninnovation-nigeria.net
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