The African agricultural production and marketing faces significant huddles for it to address the needs of the continent and achieve food security in 2030. For ages, the production and supply chains have been heavily fragmented coupled with non -transparent, insufficient and non-communicating business networks which have diminished farmer’s productive capacity and wellbeing. From a food supply and marketing side, selfish minded individuals have capitalized in this space by creating processes and networks that are exploitative. Likewise, processes that deal with production and transactional data between actors and products is rarely integrated let alone shared. As such, the disconnection and lack of transparency and accountability complicates fair pricing and quality of products.

In order to address the above problems, Challenge 7 team intends to develop a blockchain technology and apply same in Africa agriculture in the COVID 19 and post COVID 19 era.

PARTICIPANTS

Challenge currently has 29 registered members and some who are not registered but have identified on the various social media platforms from across different continent of the world.

MEAN OF COMMUNICATION

Challenge 7 created various social media platform (Whatsapp, Email and Skype) where occasionally they meet to have meetings and decide steps to achieve the goal of the team. 

WEBINAR

Challenge 7 hosted a webinar on the 23rd September, 2020 and they were 11 participants who joined the webinar out of about 36 persons that indicated interest.

BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY

Participants were asked to collate challenges information from their country’s local farmers that will be address in the development of the technology. Participants from Nigeria, Cameroun, Zambia, Uganda and Kenya submitted the challenges faced by their farmers and same was communicated to Jika (Technology developer). The technology is in the development process and will be shared with participants next weeks for familiarity and pilot testing.

WAYFORWARD

The next step for the Challenge 7 is the presentation of the Blockchain technology by Jika for familiarity, testing before the field pilot testing across Africa.