AgriHack Talent Caribbean Competition … and the winner is …

…Node420 from Jamaica, with its homonymous application that provides real-time weather analysis and automatically yields forecasts for farmers. “Collecting the information they need can be a real problem for farmers, so we decided to design some hardware that could gather all sorts of data to help them with cultivation, including planting, sowing and harvesting”, said Jason Scott, Node420 team member. “Think of it as a very compact weather station. It helps farmers to increase their yields and to forecast how much they might be able to produce”. The young ICT developers won €5000 plus six months of incubation, while their supporter, Jamaican ICT Hub Slash Roots won €3000. Second prize was awarded to CropGuard from Barbados, an application seeking to enhance food security by helping farmers to protect their crops through pest diagnosis, monitoring and control. UNICODE, from Suriname, with its application – Agri-Kari – designed to help farmers manage their land and sell their products, won the third prize.

More than 150 contestants took part in the AgriHack Talent Caribbean competition initiated by the Technical Centre for Agriculture and Rural Development (CTA) and its partners: Caribbean Farmers’ Network (CaFan), the Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute (CARDI), the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), Connectimass, Telesur, the Caribbean Open Institute and eight ICT innovation hubs. The eight regional finalists were drawn from national contests in six Caribbean countries: Barbados, Dominica, Jamaica, St. Kitts and Nevis, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago. The main goal of the competition was to develop innovative ICT applications addressing key Caribbean agricultural challenges and to drive agri-enterprise among young people. During the following six months the winning teams will receive technical and business support, including contact with potential investors and opportunities to promote their applications, as well as incubation and mentoring.  

“ICTs can strongly enhance family farming and the AgriHack Talent Caribbean initiative is supporting ICT innovations and entrepreneurship by youth in the Caribbean”, declared CTA Director Michael Hailu. “There is an undisputed need to engage youth in agriculture. Encouraging young ICT innovators to develop services for agriculture contributes to this. It also contributes to improving the image of agriculture and offers opportunities to modernize the sector.”

Source: http://bit.ly/1wmNqdD