Shamba Dynamic

Decentralized finance products such as parametric crop insurance offer smallholder farmers new options for agriculture risk management.  Decentralized finance products are also revolutionizing how local communities are incentivized to conserve their ecosystems. Accurate data and analytics are required to power such decentralized finance (defi) products. Currently, there are no dedicated providers of such geospatial information to the defi ecosystem. We are setting up this critical middleware to provide the data that will power the next generation of risk management products for smallholder farmers around the world. Once scaled globally our data will provide farmers with the financial tools to fight climate change and mitigate its impacts on their livelihoods. Our solution will also enable more advanced monitoring of ecosystems and the development of new incentives to power conservation efforts by local communities.

Many risk management products such as crop insurance have traditionally been unavailable for all but the big farmers who could afford it. There have been no bespoke products of a similar nature for smallholder farmers who usually are even more exposed to risks. Decentralized finance (defi) products such as parametric crop insurance products change all this by providing farmers around the world with highly secure and reliable insurance products. Defi also opens the door for other financial products such as derivatives and conservation-incentive schemes, which can transform the way conservation of ecosystems around the world is done in collaboration with local communities. The biggest bottleneck to the rollout of such innovative defi products is the availability of accurate and reliable data to feed the systems that run them. This data, typically provided by specialized data nodes within a decentralized oracle network, forms the backbone of all defi products and is currently not being provided in a bespoke way to defi platforms. We aim to fill this gap in the ecosystem by providing the geospatial data and analytics needed to power new defi products for ecosystem conservation and managing smallholder farmers risk.

Our solution is to provide the geospatial data and analytics that decentralized finance platforms need to build new risk management products. We are building a cloud-based analytics system that will be accessible via an application programming interface (API) and will provide data both to defi platforms as well as to various web applications. Our approach is to have an analytics engine running on the cloud that can accept a request for data, run the required analytics and return a response with the required information. The API will be built to modern standards to make it both human and machine compatible, allowing its use by other developers as well as web applications. We shall be running nodes in the Chainlink decentralized oracle network so that we can provide defi smart contracts with information about the real world derived from our geospatial analytics API. Our analytics will primarily rely on satellite imagery and artificial intelligence algorithms to extract information about the state of the environment anywhere in the world. By providing this real-world information to the blockchains that defi runs on, we shall be providing a much-needed middleware service and bringing earth observation data on-chain.

Our solution will be used to develop products that primarily serve vulnerable smallholder farming communities in emerging markets. These are typically people who do not have access to traditional insurance products and as such are highly exposed to the risks that come with farming. Furthermore weak legal systems in many countries in the developing world make traditional insurance products unattractive to such small farmers. The result is a very low rate of cover for crop risk in a region like Sub-Saharan Africa where up to 95% of the agriculture is rainfed. The consequences of this are farmers being exposed to financial shocks when rain patterns change, and entire communities being exposed to food insecurity risks. I have worked with these farmers for over six years and understand their needs for more customized risk management products. The data and analytics we are producing are based on close collaboration with farming communities around Africa. Our solution will additionally help such communities pursue new incentive schemes for environmental conservation. Schemes based on rewards for ecosystem stewardship with communities getting payment when conservation milestones are met. For instance when a given area of land is reforested or certain sustainable land management practices like terracing adopted. All these solutions will be made possible by DeFi and powered by geospatial analytics. Our solution will also provide analytics that can be used for monitoring and evaluation of ecosystem services by scientists and policy makers alike.

We are essentially applying the latest technology in the form of satellite data and machine learning to monitor the environment and availing this information to a growing ecosystem where it can be used to revolutionize conservation. Add to that the benefits of new crop insurance products that will transform the lives of millions of smallholder farmers around the world and how they do agriculture. We are also producing information that can be directly used in the scientific monitoring and quantification of ecosystem changes, and making this information public via API. This makes us well aligned with the challenge.

We have been designing our systems but have not yet begun building them yet. As such we are still at the conceptualization stage as we seek funds to finance development.

Geospatial data and analytics has not been made available to blockchain smart contracts, which has stifled innovation in certain areas of decentralized finance (defi). Chief among them is agriculture and environmental applications. Our solution aims to change this status quo and provide this data in a standardized way that is accessible to the whole world. By doing this we will enable defi product developers to build a whole new range of innovative financial products. Products that will revolutionize how smallholder farmers in emerging economies manage climate change risks. Products that will revolutionize how communities are incentivized to protect and conserve their ecosystems. We expect our work to create a layer upon which an entire ecosystem of products will be built by other parties.

We have not yet launched and are currently serving 0 people

In one year we target for our solution to be serving 400,000 farmers. On the conservation front, we target for our oracle to secure US $100 million in value for conservation schemes based on defi.

In 5 years we target to be serving at least 5 million farmers across Africa. In terms of conservation, we are targeting to secure US $1 billion in value for defi conservation schemes.

We will be monitoring the defi products our data is being channeled into. This will allow us to know not just how many people are using our data, but also the variety of products it supports in the ecosystem. We this information we shall be able to quantify the impact we are having on farmers' lives, as well as assess the impact we are having on the conservation front.

Full-time: 1

Part-time: 4

Our team is made up of individuals with strong backgrounds in geospatial sciences. We have two seasoned data scientists as well as three experienced full-stack developers. The CEO Ken has worked as a geospatial analyst and developer in several high-profile international organizations including CIAT-CGIAR. He has experience using geospatial information to deliver solutions that are environmentally sustainable around Africa. He is also a serial entrepreneur with leadership experience in the startup environment. The CTO Sam has worked on software development projects with different organizations across Africa, and so has the VP of Engineering Steve, who has even been involved in projects funded by NASA-SERVIR. Our data scientists have worked for government agencies in Kenya involved with natural resources management as well as for research for development consortiums. All members of our team hold a bachelor of science degree in geospatial engineering and some have pursued higher education in different areas. Not only are we subject matter experts in the area of geospatial data and application development, but we also understand the problems on the ground that our solution needs to address.  Coming from emerging economies we appreciate the challenges that need to be addressed to reach sustainable conservation goals in the face of climate change.

Our leadership team is small but quite horizontal. We are building a culture in the company of merit-based decision-making by group consensus. In this framework we discuss items as a group and vote on critical aspects that require consensus. We are still putting together our team and plan to ensure more diversity particularly from the gender side of things.

Our engineering team is still small but we have big plans to diversify it as we grow. We are already reaching out to talented women developers whom we would like to join our engineering team once we secure funding. We are also planning on recruiting more women for roles in the administration and management roles of the company to balance out the heavy recruitment of men in engineering. Our ethos is to be an equal opportunity employer and to recruit talent across various nationalities, genders and regions.

I would like to use my skills to change the world around me. Having worked across Africa I know how vital ecosystem services are to food security and I have seen the effects climate change can have on both. I believe we are lucky to live in a time where we have enough technology to tackle some of the biggest problems of our day. And I would like to be one of those people who take up this challenge. Being a Solver will help me achieve this ideal.

We would appreciate support in building up our global brand to be suitable to investors as we will need to raise follow-on funding as we scale up our solution. Introductions to investors and their networks will also prove useful in helping us gain the backing we need to build a global solution.

International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT-CGIAR)

We would like to partner with the above organization to explore how products based on our solution can be designed to cover farmers from risk. The organization's projects in East, West, and Southern Africa, as well as Latin America and Southeast Asia, will provide insights into how different farmer needs around the globe can be met using this solution.

We are using AI to provide solutions that improve ecosystem conservation and help small farmers derisk their operations. This makes both people and ecosystems resilient to climate change which is one of the biggest challenges humanity is facing today. If we win this prize we will use the resources to develop our capacity in machine learning, venturing on to build out a bigger data science team and develop AI algorithms for many other environmental applications.

We are building a middleware service that will serve different blockchain protocols with the data to power their smart contracts and decentralized finance products. As such we are going to be part of an important layer for the blockchain ecosystem and will enable rich geospatial information to be usable by defi product developers. We expect our outputs to drive innovation in the field of new decentralized products particularly for agriculture and the environment. If we win this prize we will use it to build out our blockchain infrastructure, investing in setting up more nodes in decentralized oracle networks and building more adapters and bridges to different protocols. Our solution is blockchain agnostic and we would like it to be used on as many protocols as possible so we would build this infrastructure out.