In a country of an estimated population of 200 million, Nigeria is Africa's wealthiest, most populous nation, and have the fastest-growing economy with or without environmental scanning challenges. Despite this, a sizeable faction of her population lives below the poverty line, and northern Nigeria suffers the world's third highest level of chronic undernutrition among children. This silent crisis is tractable to the anomalies cause by the appearance of climate change, which in turn leads to - low-rate of crop production being contributed by climate change; increasing food insecurity; and high cost of mechanization for subsistence farmers.
But how can we proffer superior solutions to this disturbing reality staring at us in the face? How do we evolve and shape-shift from a state of scarcity to a roundtable state of abundance especially in a middle income country like ours? And how do we install the art and science of innovation for agricultural development? Ladies and Gentlemen, we do this by designing and developing a USSD Agronovator. You might want to ask, what is it about this USSD Agronovator? No worries! You ain't alone here, and this is why you need to understand part and parcel of the hackathon process. You are mystified again! Stay calm and read on.
A hackathon is a design spring-like event, often, in which domain experts and others collaborate intensively on a project to solve particular problems. It is a condensed way to see the long process of designing, creating & building within an existing organisation, or as an entrepreneur. Ours began with a short pitch on an idea of providing a connection between climate change and agricultural innovation practices of the country.
During the brainstorming phase, a stream of ideas flowed and mixed between my team (Abdulhaffiz Umar, Ochanya Adah, Archibong Akpan, Uchenna Nwafor) and myself, 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 high, thereby worsening poverty and food security in Nigeria."
After critically and painstakingly scrutinizing our target market responses drawn from both the angle of their verbal and nonverbal body languages during our primary market research interviews, we understood that there is a need in redefining our initial problem statement, which turned out to flow in this style; 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 as a social technology.
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, 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 and telephone) and shadowing through Primary Market Research with some of our target personas who are mostly farmers. Our goal for this was to understand our prospects and customers rationally, emotionally, economically, socially, culturally and more.
Truth be told, the PMR was eye-opening and knowledge-expanding as the understanding towards our target market begins to changed drastically without batting an eyelid.
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 base 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 machineries 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 repositioned 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.
Here is a link to the prototype
However, a preview is given below;
The USSD platform is for collaborative hire of farm machineries, storage facilities, and other farm inputs to: reduce cost when hiring, ease access to farm equipments 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 subsistence farmers, and collaborative hiring model. It uniqueness lies in it mobile technology were farmers can get connected to Machinery Providers, agro allied industries, storage facilities, and agro-information channels.
The Pitch Day
Here we are, on the d-day breathing heavily like a little drenched puppy. We were expected to reel out in torrent the solution to whatsoever problem we have identified weeks before now. Of course, we were to do this not just before the already known IFA team but also before a panel of intellectual judges who were waiting patiently to toggle us with unseen observations and questions enshrined in constructive criticism.
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 thereby increase food availability, and to provide weather information to inform farmers decision on growing period.
You might want to argue with your keypad on this, but with USSD Agronovator, we can't wait to feed you!!!