Digitalisation is impacting every industry today with agriculture as an especially ripe opportunity, given limited innovative developments in recent years.
Therefore, to leverage on the digital, technical and enterprise talent available in Asia, a hackathon called the Grow Asia Hackathon (“Hackathon”) was devised. It sets out to address the productivity, profitability and sustainability challenges faced by South East Asia’s 100 million smallholder farmers (“smallholders”) through data-sharing at scale.
Led by Grow Asia — a multi-stakeholder partnership platform established by the World Economic Forum, in collaboration with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Secretariat — the Hackathon also involved corporate collaboration by partnering with fast-moving consumer goods company Unilever, Japan’s MUFG Bank (“MUFG”) and Bayer, a German agricultural chemicals and biotechnology company.
For Grow Asia, two elements were defined as key to the successful impact of the Hackathon :
- Finding good ideas that would be actionable tomorrow
- And getting solutions which could be scaled through corporate connections
However, given the specialised focus of the Hackathon on palm oil farming for smallholders, teams needed to also be equipped with the necessary knowledge and insights to create relevant solutions.
Grow Asia managed to do so successfully via :
I. Knowledge-Building through a Pre-Hackathon Workshop
A week before the actual hackathon, participants attended the pre-hackathon workshop which introduced the problem statements to be addressed.
They got to hear from subject matter experts in the palm oil ecosystem such as Rauf Prasodjo, Unilever Indonesia’s Sustainable Sourcing Manager, who showcased painpoints such as challenges impacting Unilever’s Sustainable Palm Oil Sourcing Policy. Beyond these insights, the pre-hackathon workshop also offered participants access to real-world datasets which further informed them on the painpoints and opportunities available, emphasising on the Hackathon’s focus of how data-sharing at scale could create impactful solutions. With over 80 participants, representing a diverse group ranging from university students to developers as well as startups, the workshop also enabled participants to come together in teams before the Hackathon based on the skills they required.
II. Leveraging Human-Centric Insights for Creating Solutions
To ensure beneficial impact on the smallholders, the Hackathon also focused on advancing relevant solutions. Here, teams benefitted from conducting interviews with stakeholders as well as getting mentorship from experts.
Through user interviews with stakeholders in the ecosystem, such as smallholders and palm oil mill operators, teams were able to identify specific painpoints which their solutions could address. These were then enhanced by leveraging on the knowledge of mentors from Grow Asia’s corporate collaboration network which included experts from companies like Yara — a Norwegian multinational company specialising in fertilisers. Coupled with real-world data such as satellite imagery from Planet Labs and weather data from IBM’s The Weather Company, teams were able to develop integrated solutions that addressed the needs of smallholders.
Following a gruelling 15-hour hackathon over two days, 21 teams were at Unilever’s LEVEL3 coworking space to pitch their ideas to win the S$5,000 (US$3,700) grand prize as well as an opportunity for corporate collaboration with the companies involved to scale up their solution.
Solutions pitched focused on enabling farmers to access information, credit and services as well as the adoption of sustainable farming practices. These were aimed at improving their livelihoods whilst contributing to a more sustainable food system.
In the end, six winners were selected with Team A winning the grand prize for their chatbot solution.
As shared by Adrian Teo from Team A, his focus before the Hackathon was on the farmers and finding ways which could help them decrease costs and increase productivity. This led to the decision to emphasise on enabling farmers to learn from successes. Through their tool, Team A aims to do so by pooling and consolidating existing knowledge, data and best practices from successful farmers, agribusinesses and other value chain stakeholders. Recognising the need to use a platform which was easy for the farmers to use, Adrian’s team also decided to use a chatbot to implement their solution. In the future, they hope that data gathered via interactions with the tool could be shared at a larger scale, revealing useful insights about agriculture and farming practices in South East Asia.
Amongst the metrics used to evaluate teams for their solutions, a key requirement was the team’s understanding of the farmers’ needs. Team A’s use of a chatbot managed to leverage on technology which farmers were already familiar with, winning the vote of the judges for its user-friendly interface and low production costs. It provided an easy way for farmers to become comfortable with digitalisation whilst still providing long-term scalability for the solution.
As shared by Paul Voutier, Digital Manager at Grow Asia and one of the judges,
“Our goal for the Hackathon was to harness pre-existing data and digital ecosystem actors to demonstrate how data sharing can be done at scale. Connecting smallholder farmers to advice, finance, payments and logistics over their mobile phone will be game changing and has to start somewhere. The winning team’s messaging-based solution is an important first step in this process, and we are excited to work hand in hand with Team A and our partners, Unilever, MUFG and Bayer, to take the solution to the ground and impact smallholders.“
The value of the Hackathon was also clear to corporate collaboration partners like MUFG. Yip Shue Heng, Head of Digital Transformation Division, Asia, echoed this sentiment by saying,
“The advent of robust and affordable digital technologies is set to transform the way we transact, grow and reach markets. We are excited about this partnership and look forward to charting the path forward to address opportunities in growth markets, to ensure sustainability and financial inclusivity for the ecosystem across Digital ASEAN. Transformation of our customer interface channels is part of our digital strategies and we look forward to adopting unique solutions in light of new trends to better meet the communities’ needs.”
Unilever Asia’s Amit Mohta, Vice President – Global Procurement, Commodities, Food Ingredients and Risk Management, placed special emphasis on the value of the Hackathon for an organisation like Unilever,
“In line with Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan commitments, we aim to help transform the palm industry and improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers. We selected four key issues for the hackathon teams where new thinking is required to address needs of smallholder farmers. These were; driving productivity improvements, gaining easier access to finance, dealing with logistic debottlenecking and easier traceability and data sharing across all ecosystem actors. The participants did very well to appreciate the issues and bring their best ideas and solutions.”
With the commitments made by the various stakeholders on funding, expertise and other resources, it will be exciting to see how the project develops in the coming months.