On the 18th of April 2023, we opened submissions for the Ag-hackathon segment of Code Cash Crop 4.0. With the Pan-African twist to this year's edition, we looked forward to diverse, balanced, and robust solutions from young innovators across Nigeria and Kenya for the three defined challenges in Data, Logistics, and Extension.

Our team of Xperts designed a targeted outreach to this effect, putting out calls for proposals across our social media platforms, but also getting some awesome media partners to amplify the call for us. We also integrated a hub and school tour, visiting tech hubs and universities in Lagos, Ibadan, Kaduna, Abuja, and Kenya. These significant efforts helped us to build a truly inspiring community for CCC 4.0 with a very clear message on the power of youth participation and engagement in spearheading innovation in our food systems.

An exciting mix of solutions started to come in from the moment that we launched the call for proposals. The steady stream of submissions and the excited response across our communication channels led to one deadline extension, leading us to finally wrap up the process by June 14th, 2023. Summarily, we had a close to three-month challenge asking for the most daring and innovative ideas that answered identified gaps in data, logistics, and extension for our food systems in Africa.

The infographic below presents the data on submissions and our eventual shortlist.

One of the key insights that leaped out in considering this data was the limited number of applications submitted by women or women-led groups. Of 146 submissions, only 7.53% of the solution proposals belonged to women, totaling just 11 solutions.

The AFEX Lens

One of the core Sustainable Development Goals that form a part of our Theory of Change at AFEX is SDG 5 - Gender Equality. Our commitment to “Achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls” is incredibly important to us at AFEX leading to some necessary reflection on the process and outlook to incentivizing further female participation in future Code Cash Crop editions.

Below I reflect on some of the core learnings that will form our basis for attacking this issue in CCC 5.0 and onwards.

Outreach to communities that prioritize female participation: We found very valuable this year, our partnerships with hub and university communities in driving qualitative applications that truly made our solution pool rich. Going forward, these partnerships will continue to be highly valuable, but we also look forward, in the next iteration, to partnering with communities with a heavy focus on female participation.

Target a subset of our messaging directly at women: Our messaging and design system for Code Cash Crop 4.0 embraced a pan-African and youthful direction. As we look ahead to CCC 5.0 with an open mind, we already have made an early commitment to focusing some of our messaging directly on women to encourage them to participate.

Launch a spotlight series for women in agriculture and technology: Finally, we continue to believe in the power of role models and of people being inspired by seeing those who look like them thriving in different scenarios. Ahead of the next Code Cash Crop edition, we aim to spotlight many brilliant women working in AgriTech today and enabling our food systems to thrive, with the hope that they will encourage a lot more brilliant women to join the charge for food system transformation in Africa.