Alongside our partners, we are delighted to announce the three winners of the 2024 Kofi Annan Award for Innovation in Africa: Amini, ChipChip and Fresh Networks.
The 2024 edition of the Award honours three innovative African ventures creating solutions to end hunger across the African continent. The winners will receive up to EUR 250,000 in funding to continue scaling their venture with tailored support from the World Food Programme Innovation Accelerator, the Kofi Annan Foundation, the Austrian Federal Chancellery, and the Austrian Development Agency.
Six finalists were also recognized for their accomplishments. All nine ventures represent the brightest locally powered solutions to improving food security in Africa.
The Award Winners
Amini
Amini addresses Africa’s critical data scarcity that impacts agriculture and hinders efforts to minimize post-harvest losses and adopt sustainable practices. The venture provides highly accurate end-to-end data aggregation and analysis for diverse land at scale, leveraging real-time satellite imagery, existing data maps and client data. Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), Amini measures crop conditions, water stress, soil moisture and more. To commercialize this technology, Amini built an Application Programming Interface (API) that can be integrated with various institutions such as banks, insurance companies and governmental entities, providing them with high-quality data for better assessments and planning. The same data also benefits farmers, who receive insights to improve yields (incomes) via a smart SMS system for free.
ChipChip
Long and fragmented agricultural supply chains cause inefficiencies, volatility and inflated prices that impact smallholder farmers, food businesses and urban consumers in Ethiopia.
ChipChip optimizes the supply chain from farm to consumer. Firstly, it utilizes a “social/group buying” model, aggregating demand to enable smallholder farmers to sell bulk agri-foods directly to consumers at discounts of over 20 percent. Secondly, by leveraging its mobile app, ChipChip matches orders with gig drivers for fast delivery to buyers, significantly reducing warehouse and logistics costs. This innovative approach fosters producer-consumer linkages, decreases costs for households, creates jobs and unlocks value along agricultural supply chains.
FRESH Networks (by KOKO Networks)
Most of the 3.8 million low-income urban households in Kenya buy loose milk from informal retailers in their neighbourhoods, as packaged milk typically costs 30–40 percent more. These loose milk channels are unregulated and the supply is untraceable, putting consumers at risk of milk-borne health hazards or forgoing a vital source of nutrition, especially for children.
FRESH Networks offers low-income urban Kenyans safe and high-quality milk at affordable prices via a network of smart milk dispensers supported by an IoT-enabled supply chain. FRESH Networks sources pasteurized milk from reliable dairy companies and transports it to automated milk dispensers located in micro-retailer partners’ shops in lower-income neighbourhoods. Customers can buy any amount of milk using a digital token system. All inventory, payment and logistics data is tracked via the Fresh Networks cloud system, maximizing quality, availability and affordability for consumers, and efficiency and reach for dairies.
Kofi Annan Award for Innovation in Africa Finalists
- Grow For Me connects investors with specific farms or commodities through an intuitive crowdfunding platform, ensuring fair prices for farmers and reducing post-harvest losses.
- Jokalante democratizes access to climate and market data by providing reliable data, regardless of the local language of the audience, via an SAAS platform.
- Karpolax addresses post-harvest losses in the agricultural sector by leveraging green nanotechnology to extend the shelf life of fruits and vegetables.
- Kivu Green leverages USSD technology improve farmers’ data access without an internet connection, using AI to provide real-time information to farmers via mobile phones.
- MamaPesa helps women secure funding for their income-generating ventures and achieve economic resilience and independence.
- Solerchill empowers vendors, farmers and food dealers to safely preserve unsolved food by manufacturing, renting out and selling solar-powered cold rooms.
The Kofi Annan Award for Innovation in Africa has been initiated by the Austrian Federal Chancellery, together with the Kofi Annan Foundation. The award is operationally supported by the Austrian Development Agency and the WFP Innovation Accelerator. The Kofi Annan Award for Innovation in Africa seeks to raise awareness for the potential African entrepreneurs hold to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and honour the late Kofi Annan’s legacy and commitment to a more just and equitable world. The Award also aims to identify and support promising social entrepreneurs with digital or technology-powered solutions for people in Africa to help them build the foundations to scale.
After a successful first edition, the second edition of the Kofi Annan Award for Innovation in Africa is committed to identifying and supporting innovative solutions that enhance food security and food systems resilience throughout Africa.
