Africa’s food system is being threatened by climate change and the population of Africa is expected to double by 2050 (FAO, 2020) at an estimate of over 2 Billion. Nigeria currently has a population estimate of 201 million and it’s expected to be over 400 million in 2050 (FAO, World Bank Group, 2020). There is high demand for food due to increase in population and our changing climate has further worsened the situation creating vulnerabilities, hunger and poverty among the population. From this background, small holder play a critical role in providing over 78% of the food needs yet the Country still suffers food insecurity. Over 76% of the population lives in rural areas and about 82% of people living in rural areas are small holder farmers. Therefore if we are to actualize a food sufficient nation, then, we need to improve the services of small holder farmers and tool them with more sophisticated and user-friendly solutions to aid their farming activities and ensure agricultural production in improved drastically. The solution is the “Agronovator” a USSD-based solution that farmers can access useful information to solve their farming needs. It was my privilege to coin the word "Agronovator"
A hackathon is a design thinking and brainstorming activity, often, in which a team of like minds collaborate to work on a particular need (project) to solve a particular problem using a human-centered lens. It is a pathway of creating, designing, analyzing and building a solution that can make an organization work more efficiently and effectively. In this case, we began with a short pitch on an idea of providing a model that can link climate change and agricultural innovation practices to Nigeria
During the brainstorming phase, a stream of ideas flowed and mixed between my team (Abdulhaffiz Umar, Ochanya Adah, Adeyinka Meduoye, Uchenna Nwafor) and myself (Archibong Akpan), where we finally reach a juncture on "how climate change is affecting crop production and crop yield, and how this is driving the price of foodstuff, thereby worsening poverty, hunger and food security in Nigeria."
After analysing our target customers’ responses drawn from both the angle of their verbal and nonverbal body languages during our primary market research interviews, we understood that there was a need to rejig our initial problem statement stated as thus: How best can we upscale crop production and farmers adoption through agricultural innovation? My team and I had to effectively brainstorm, collaborate, and communicate our ideas using design thinking process with a human-centered lens.
Design thinking is an iterative process that tests one's ability to solve problems through creativity and critical thinking. In case you are wondering, this iterative process can only be seen in five phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test.
Empathize
Of course, this is the foundation of human-centered design. The problems you’re trying to solve are rarely your own, they’re those of particular users. Build empathy for your users by learning their values. To empathize (putting yourself in the other persons’ shoes), you must view users and their behavior in the context of their lives; interact with and interview users through both scheduled and short ‘intercept’ encounters; and wear your users’ shoes. Experience what they experience for a mile or two.
Ours began with interviews (face-to-face) - Primary Market Research with some of our target personas who were mostly farmers. Our goal for this was to understand our target personas background, existing problems and challenges they encounter during agricultural production and value chain.
Define
Here is when you unpack your empathy findings into needs and insights and scope a meaningful challenge. It is advisable that the newly Defined Problem Statement must be based on human-centered design and not on business-design. The reason is it gives you the capability and insights in approaching the problem with more drives in reaching a superior solution than seeing it from a monetary angle.
Based on our understanding of our target/user personas and their environments, we were able to come up with an actionable problem statement, which was "How best can we upscale crop production and farmers adoption through agricultural innovation?"
Alongside this, we also came up with three "How might we" questions, which are:
How might we create flood mitigation solutions that will reduce flood impact on crop production and storage capacity?
How might we reduce pollution, and help create efficient food supply across Nigeria?
How might we improve access to tractors and farm machinery in Nigeria?
Ideation
Ideate is the mode in which you generate radical design alternatives. Ideation is a process of “going wide” in terms of concepts and outcomes—a mode of “flaring” instead of “focus”. The goal of ideation is to explore a wide solution space—both a large quantity and broad diversity of ideas.
With an objective of transiting from identifying problems and exploring solutions for our target/user personas, my team and I were able to re-positioned our ideas on a whiteboard through convergent thinking. From this, we thoroughly applied the character of divergent thinking in making an idea in which we built prototypes to test with users.
Prototype
With our top three ideas on ground, we were determined to get them out of our heads and into the world through prototyping.
With the factors of desirability, viability, and feasibility staring at us in the face, we were able to have flurries of clear interactions, which drives our deeper empathy for the sole of testing. Through this, USSD Agronovator was birthed to shape successful solutions.
To further deepen our understanding of our target/user personas and the design space, we prototype with another hackathon group. Click here. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1otHo75VekF3k1Uc1OQNXWsSkTvOicm1XOS4FtLtU3DE/edit?usp=sharing
Workablity of the technology (Agronovator)
The USSD platform is for collaborative hire of farm machinery, storage facilities, and other farm inputs to: reduce cost when hiring, ease access to farm equipment for mechanization, and connect local farmers encouraging group farming.
It has a better and easy user interface - the USSD based service with Inclusion of native languages (Yoruba, Hausa, and Igbo), focus on small scale farmers, and collaborative hiring model. It uniqueness lies in its user-friendly capability were farmers can get connected to Machinery Providers, agro allied industries, seeds, weather information, precision spraying, storage facilities, and agro-information channels.
The Pitch Day
The pitch day is the day we were given opportunity to show case our Project. We were already looking super excited to demonstrate our solution to other fellows and in the presence of an independent panel of intellectual judges to assess our presentation, evaluate our solution and provide feedback and recommendation.
Our pitch focused on - what problem we are solving, what impact does our product USSD Agronovator have on it, the solution it will provide, and the implementation plan.
Our value proposition is to provide more farmers with access to farm machinery, seeds, weather services, cropping schedule/calendar, extension services, farm inputs, post-harvesting and storage facilities and much more to scale up agricultural production and improve the agricultural value chain.
Our last short was "With USSD Agronovator"; we can't wait to feed you!!!