FarmEasy
Project Summary
Project Duration: July 2021, 14 Days
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Context: An intense 2-weeks Hackathon, organized in the Innovation Readiness Training (IRT) of Novustack (Innovate for Africa Fellowship) July cycle.
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The prompt: Provide a solution to help smallholder farmers maximize supply chain and financial inclusion. Deliver a prototype and pitch the solution at the end of 2weeks.
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Solution: Our team created an online platform that collects farmers’ data from cooperatives and assigns them a credit score to access affordable finance; They are also linked to off-takers to sell profitably.
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My Role: Data Analyst and Project Manager
Key Skills
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Problem-solving
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Concept ideation
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Research & organization
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Documentation
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Project Management
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Design with Canva
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Creativity & Critical Thinking
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Data collection/analysis
A DESIGN THINKING APPROACH
Empathizing
Rather than making assumptions and taking a proposed solution to these smallholder farmers, we carried out a Primary Market Research(PMR); interviewing 7 smallholder farmers from two different countries, Nigeria and Uganda to understand their problems and identify pain points. This gave us better insights into the major challenges that they encounter.
Additional information:
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Customer Persona
Having gained insight from conducting primary market research, we went on to build a persona for our potential customers. This helped us to tailor our solution for an ideal user experience.
Define
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Provided with an open-ended prompt, we identified that at the beginning of every planting season and during harvest, smallholder farmers that have less than 2 hectares of farmland are unable to expand their farms to produce in large quantities and sell profitably; this makes them sad as they make less than N20,000 profit. Leaving them the options of microfinance banks and open markets with high interest rates and ridiculously low prices.
We did this by reviewing the answers from the interview and coding the information using the problem statement canvas.
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Problem Statement: How might we provide smallholder farmers in rural communities in Nigeria with finance at the beginning of a planting season and profitable sales after harvest?
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Ideate
The team got together over a group call to proffer possible solutions to the underlying problem. Using a digital kanban board -Trello, we adopted divergent and convergent thinking techniques to arrive at our solution.
After identifying two issues from our problem statement which are access to funds and access to market, we adopted the attribute listing technique by further breaking down the problem into two parts and suggested solutions to each of these before converging to a solution that serves both problems.
Prototype
We began the prototyping process by storyboarding the entire process flow. Showing how the platform was going to operate. Then proceeded to use Figma to design our prototype. I collaborated with other teammates to brainstorm and design the process flow and afterward contributed insights to the design process on Figma.
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Landing Page
SignUp Page
Login Page
Interface for Cooperatives
General marketplace for farmers to showcase their products to potential buyers.
PITCH DAY!
Together, after applying all design thinking processes, we pitched our solution-FarmEasy. The presentation was made to panel of Judges consisting of Industry experts, Startup Founders, and the Novustack leaders. To ensure effective participation from the team while utilizing the strengths of every team member in all stages, we took turns explaining different sections of the Pitch Deck. I took the parts that explained who our solution was for as well as our competitor analysis.
On evaluation from the judges, our team performed excellently and scored a whopping 90 points out of 100. One of the judges also showed interest in working with us to push the idea.
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Some of the feedback we got are;
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"Congratulations you were a strong last team to present! Great work on your presentation and pitch. It was wonderful to see your group come together as a team."
~Facilitators
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"- Problem: Liked the focused storytelling focused on a single farmer's experience
- Solution: alternative financing/credit scoring makes sense - already identified a number of inputs to feed into the ML model, and understand the overall value chain (inclusion of off-takers to guarantee demand and lock in return for lenders)
- Competition: laid out a clear competitive differentiation with a focus on cooperatives”
~Remen(Hackathon Judge)
REFLECTIONS
I observed the following rules of thumb
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Use the right tools. At the ideation stage, we kept going in circles until using Trello helped us to visualize ideas.
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Emotional intelligence helps to understand the different personalities in a team and how to relate with each one.
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Divide and conquer always! Diving tasks helps to achieve so much in little time.
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Over-communicate if possible. Revisit decisions and ideas to carry everyone along.
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Organization and documentation of every step gives a birds eye view of the project and helps with understanding.