IFA (Innovate for Africa), an entrepreneurship and innovation training ground, kicked off its 2021 cohort on the 4th of January with an orientation process where fellows like myself were introduced to its core values of growth mindset, grit, innovation, diversity, inclusivity and collaboration and its aim to prepare fellows for the start up world through four main training sections: Personal branding, Design thinking, Strategy and Hard skills lab.
With an introduction to design thinking, a system used by innovators and designers to maximize innovative capacity, came the IFA Hackathon where fellows were divided into hackathon teams to solve a problem in a selected sector.
My team had chosen the sector of Climate change and the problem area of smart Agriculture and after brainstorming, stormed out with the Problem statement: Climate change is affecting crop production and yield, worsening poverty and food security in Nigeria. How do we leverage technology and data analysis to improve crop production and ultimately reduce poverty in Nigeria? We then went on to conduct our PMR interviews to validate our assumptions and understand better, the user persona for whom the problem would be solved.
Conducting the interviews, a number of questions were asked and included the following 10 questions:
Why farming?
What are your motivations and goals?
What has your farming experience been like?
What are the challenges you currently face?
What are the challenges with the use of farm machinery?
How has climate change impacted you as a farmer?
What have you done so far to tackle these challenges?
What are the challenges with the use of farm machinery?
How does payments for fertilizers affect your crop production?
How do you think these challenges can best be addressed?
After conducting the Primary Market Research interviews, we learned that we had to take a more human centered approach to defining the problem, and we were able to have more specific information on the climate change effect on the farmers. It was also eye opening to learn that the farmers had other problems that seemed more pressing than the effects of climate change.
My understanding of my customer has changed as I was able to gain insight into their motivations and goals. I understand now that they may farm as a routine that's part of their tradition or to supplement their income and may not necessarily want mass crop production to feed the country. My focus has shifted from increasing crop production to finding ways to make the potential customer happy by providing what's necessary to help them overcome the recognized challenges.