Event by the Global Network Digital Agriculture Innovation Hubs on sharing experiences about Innovation Challenges highlights the need of cross-sector collaboration and investing to youth
The Flexible Voluntary Contribution (FVC) sub-programme on Global Network Digital Agriculture Innovation Hubs held its second global event with a theme on “Sharing experiences about Innovation Challenges”, bringing together innovators, young entrepreneurs, and field experts.
Innovation Challenges are a powerful instrument to accelerate innovation for responding to the challenges the agrifood system is facing by harnessing high-quality idea submissions from diverse groups to develop revolutionary solutions and offer an enabling environment, heightening skills and capacities.
The session aimed to facilitate knowledge sharing and dialogue on recent experiences from the Innovation Challenges and other innovation initiatives held by OIN to foster sharing of ideas and experiences. Among these successful initiatives is the Global AgriInno Challenge (GAC), which aims to identify, accelerate, and scale up youth-led innovative business models and solutions for agrifood system issues.
The event heard from Zhejiang University’s perspective on hosting the GAC, with amplifying stories from the journeys of previous winners of the Challenge.
“Young people play a key role in harnessing groundbreaking ideas to fight hunger and poverty and contribute towards achieving the SDGs, and we need to support and provide opportunities for growth for them.” – Prof. Longbao Wei, Zhejiang University
Experts working with innovation initiatives across the FAO offices also shared their learnings, including the FAO Smart Agriculture Competition by FAO China and initiatives under the Multidisciplinary Fund (MDF) in FAO Mauritania.
The speakers highlighted the fact that agri-entrepreneurs have exciting, innovative, and groundbreaking ideas to fight hunger and poverty and contribute towards achieving the SDGs. Incubators play a key role in promoting innovation and entrepreneurship, and several key factors contribute to hosting successful Innovation Challenges are, include timely, need-based calls, effective stakeholder management, and collaborative partnerships.
As digitalization in agriculture takes leaps, we risk the widening of the gender gap: women and youth have lower access to and limited availability of capital affordability of new technologies. Including young women requires overcoming mobility and spatial constraints that require dedicated communication campaigns at the local level. There is an urgent need to ensure transparency, security, equality and efficiency of financing systems to create the enabling environment needed for digitalization, and to continue to invest in youth.
About The DAIHs
The Global Network of Digital Agriculture Innovation Hubs (DAIHs), an FVC sub-programme launched at the end of 2021, aims to mainstream digital agriculture innovation while promoting agrifood systems’ digital transformation. The in-country DAIHs are designed considering the national strategic priorities, digital maturity, and local needs. Then, the Global Network then interconnects the national DAIHs to share knowledge, experiences, and expertise – this activity seeks to provide for the first global event for the FMM/GLO/159/MUL project.