Jakarta, 10 December 2021 – Top three digital solutions were announced to be the winners of the Cultivhacktion, an agricultural hackathon supported by the Ministry of Agriculture and West Java Provincial Government and initiated by World Bank Group, TaniHub Group, and Microsoft. Since it was first kicked-off at the end of September, the hackathon, which was held to crowdsource technological solutions in order to accelerate the digitization of the agricultural ecosystem in Indonesia, has received positive enthusiasm by receiving 30 submissions, which covered a diverse range of digital solutions as well as value chains. Ten teams proceeded to the next round and received mentoring support in agriculture, business development, and technology by subject matter experts to refine their solutions, before being narrowed down to the final three.
Pamitra Wineka, CEO of TaniHub Group said he truly appreciates all the great efforts showcased by the participants and is looking forward to witnessing the best ideas translated into solutions that would help farmers across the country to scale their business and improve their welfare.
“At TaniHub Group, we believe that everyone can make an impact. With the vision of ‘Agriculture for Everyone’, we want to accelerate the positive impact of Indonesia’s agriculture sector through the use of digital technology. I am hoping that Cultivhacktion may inspire more young people to create new solutions that will help agriculture and, eventually, Indonesia’s overall economy,” he said.
The top three solutions were selected based on the level of innovation, relevance, implementation, impact and sustainability of their solutions, collaboration, team management and pitch delivery. The three solutions seek to address a number of different challenges that are often encountered in the Indonesian agri-food system:
- Teman Pasar (by Teman Pasar Team) is a shopping platform for daily, weekly, and monthly needs at the nearest traditional markets in Indonesia. The number of agricultural products sellers in traditional market sellers across 512 districts/cities in Indonesia reach 12 million*, but they are declining about 8% every year. This is most likely due to the shift of consumers purchasing habit to modern market in the past 10 years. Teman Pasar, therefore, will help and empower the traditional market sellers to reach more consumers digitally, opening access toward capital and finance, and facilitate the products supply from sellers in wholesale markets and farmers who have collaborated with Teman Pasar – so that it can solve the agricultural problems from upstream to downstream. The sellers, nicknamed Teman Pedagang, only need to upload their kiosks and products to Teman Pasar apps, as well as updating the latest price when there are price changes. Consumers then can find Teman Pedagang’s kiosks and products easily. Through “suka-suka” or sellers’ products catalogue, Teman Pasar delivers shopping experience just like when consumers buy goods from the market. Once consumers make a purchase, delivery partners (Teman Antar) will pick up the goods and deliver the order to consumers.
- Tania (by Neurafarm Team) is an AI-powered crop protection and management platform that can reduce crops failure, increase smallholder farmers profit, and reduce chemical waste. Crop loss has been a threat for global food security and become financial burden for farmers as it results into 20-40%* of annual loss. With Dr. Tania, farmers can manage crop disease and prevent crops failure easily. Farmers can simply snap a photo of the crop, get an analysis of the crop condition in seconds, get recommendation on how to take care of the crop, and get the right products for the crops. Beyond disease, Dr. Tania will also soon be able to boost productivity through data-driven farming by capturing valuable data and delivering information at scale to predict the yield, plan and monitor fieldwork, give recommendations to farmers at all stages of work, as well as predict plants disease and emergence of pests.
- PemPem (by PemPem Team) is a mobile supply chain management software for informal micro-enterprises in commodity supply chains. Up to 99% of business enterprises in Indonesia are Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises, many of which are in agriculture, and they contribute 56% of Indonesia’s GDP***. Their operations and finance are often unreliable, unstructured and undocumented. PemPem aims to remediate these challenges by rendering micro-agripreneurs’ access to market in an efficient and reliable manner. Its mobile application structures, optimizes and connects operations, finances and micro producers in the commodity supply chains; improving the livelihoods of micro-agripreneurs. PemPem’s solutions currently 1) allow buyers to upload prices and provide price transparency, 2) enable sellers to upload sales, track revenue and productivity, while enable buyers to record their loans to sellers, and 3) provide digital payments through in-app payment and e-money to bridge digital payment between banked and unbanked. In 2022, PemPem plans to extend its services to enable optimized matching between smallholder farmers and buyers, provide access to financial services, and formalize farm operations through farm permit certification (STDB).
Panji Wasmana, National Technology Officer Microsoft Indonesia said, “These solutions are opening the future of digital agriculture, where technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cloud, Machine Learning, and advanced analytics empower smallholder farmers. These allow them to increase income from higher crop yields, helping the agricultural community and their families, as well as contributing greatly to the digital economy of Indonesia. Moving forward, Microsoft is ready to take even more parts in the journey of creating a data-based agriculture system in Indonesia through our technology solutions.”
Dina Umali-Deininger, Practice Manager, Agriculture and Food Global Practice, East Asia and the Pacific, The World Bank said, “To ensure promotion and scale-up of digital technologies’ adoption in agriculture, especially by the many smallholder farmers, the public and private sectors working together will be key. Cultivhacktion provides an example of how public and private actors could come together to nurture the country’s agri-tech talents. I also hope that the hackathon has helped open doors for more and stronger public-private partnerships to support the digital transformation of the agriculture sector, including in nurturing Indonesia’s agri-tech talents.” The World Bank Group looks forward to continue working with the hackathon finalists, as well as the country’s agri-tech community.
World Bank Group, TaniHub Group, Microsoft, and eight other partners will facilitate further support and opportunities for the innovators to further finetune and/or pilot their solutions. Together with the partners namely GIZ, Plug and Play, FAO, IPB University, Data Science Indonesia, GrowAsia, Planet, and MDI Ventures, this will include facilitating their access to key stakeholders in the agri-food sector – including the government, smallholder farmers, and the agri-food industry players – to showcase and test their solutions.
Elke Sümnick-Matthaei and Johanna Braun, Co-Leads of the Digitalization Portfolio of the GIZ Fund for the Promotion of Innovation in Agriculture (i4Ag), underline the importance of linking agriculture and data for impact through the Cultivhacktion. “It is great to see how this digital hackathon has put the spotlight on data-based agriculture in West Java and has encouraged young people to think out of the box. We are really looking forward to seeing how the participants will pilot their innovative solutions over the next weeks and months. We would also like to express our appreciation to particularly the World Bank Group, TaniHub Group and Microsoft for being the lead facilitators of these incredibly enriching last few weeks of the Cultivhacktion, and of course to all other partners who have made this a big success,” said Elke.
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*Indonesia Central Bureau Statistics (2019)
***Micro and Small Businesses in Indonesia’s Digital Economy (apfcanada-msme.ca)