Eight Caribbean partners selected to participate in the Agrihack Talent Caribbean competition

ICT4AG – Eight Caribbean Technology and Innovation Hubs have been selected to participate in the Agrihack Talent Caribbean competition, which seeks to support the development of ICT innovations and entrepreneurship in agriculture by young tech talent. The event is being staged by the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA), in collaboration with institutions including the Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute (CARDI), the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) and ConnectiMass Hub (cHub).

The hubs/partners selected are The Community HUB Corporation (Trinidad and Tobago), Slashroots Foundation (Jamaica), Create Caribbean (Dominica), Quintessence Consulting Inc (St Kitts), National Council for Science and Technology (Barbados), Software Engineering Lab, Department of Computing, UWI (Jamaica), Telesur Multimedia Innovation Laboratory (Suriname) and Noviate Creative Labs Limited (Trinidad – to be confirmed).

Private, public sector and non-government run innovation or entrepreneurship hubs/labs/communities (including university labs) were invited to express interest in being partners, that will nominate and support teams to the finals of the Agrihack Talent Caribbean competition in Suriname.

The Caribbean Innovation hubs are charged with staging national hackathons or competitive coding selection events. The winning teams from the national events will move on to the regional finals that will be held during the Caribbean Week of Agriculture (CWA) to be held in Suriname from 6 – 12 October 2014. An incubation process will follow for winners to fine-tune their products and favour actual roll-out.

Launched in East Africa, now in the Caribbean!

The Agrihack Championship, which focused on East Africa, took the form of a regional tournament, with key stakeholders involved in the preliminary phase to identify the agricultural challenges needing solutions from ICT applications. A series of national selection events was held before the nine most promising entries, drawn from six countries, were invited to the finals, held in Kigali, Rwanda on November 7, 2013, as part of CTA’s 2013 ICT4Ag Conference. All the entries were from young people interested in developing ICT solutions for agriculture. Many of them are still students.   #agrihack more