Winners announced in BCI technology challenge
Better Cotton Initiative (BCI), the Geneva-based body that campaigns for increased production and consumption of “more sustainable cotton”, has announced the winners of a technology challenge it launched last year.
It worked with social enterprise IDH (The Sustainable Trade Initiative) and consultancy Dalberg Advisors to set up the Better Cotton Innovation Challenge. The aim was to to find new ideas for scaling up the production of more sustainable cotton.
The challenge focused on two areas: customised training for cotton farmers and data collection to enable more efficient BCI licensing.
Israel-based agricultural-tech start-up Agritask has emerged as the winner and will take away a cash prize of €100,000. Agritask won for its development of a mobile app that allows farmers to adopt digital solutions “in a way that works for them”. Its platform enables remote monitoring. Data that it captures helps the system to provide “actionable insights”, tailored to each user.
Second place in the competition went to India-based agricultural-tech company, CropIn, winning it a cash award of € 35,000. Its entry was a digital farm management solution that enables “complete digitisation” of farming processes. The platform empowers data-driven decision-making and provides complete visibility on a near real-time basis, helping farmers address issues such as pest-control and crop-health.
“Congratulations to Agritask and CropIn, who persevered and piloted their solutions despite the challenges and set-backs caused by covid-19 this year,” said BCI programme manager, Cristina Martín Cuadrado. “We are excited to be exploring next steps and a potential roll-out plan.”
