Two young Ghanaian Agritech firms, Trotro Tractor Ltd and Ghalani have been adjudged the overall winners of the Kosmos Innovation Agritech Challenge Award.
The two firms, apart from receiving technical and mentoring assistance from the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology will also have seed money of $50,000 each to realize their ideas.
Trotro Tractor was selected for developing a platform that uses mobile phones and GPS units to connect farmers to tractor operators within their vicinity, while Ghalani was chosen for creating farm management software that helps agricultural aggregators to efficiently organize, manage, and monitor small-holder farmers.
Speaking to Citi Business News at the award ceremony, the Country Manager of Kosmos Energy, Joe Mensah explained that the aim of the award is to help revive agriculture as an important sector of the economy.
“When the Kosmos Innovation Center was established …we chose agriculture to invest and bring innovation and technology to agriculture over other equally important sectors because agriculture… used to be over 60 percent of our GDP. Now it is down to about 19 percent. We needed to do something to revive it. Kosmos decided that, there is no better place to start it but to tap the potential of our youth who are looking for direction,” he said.
“What we needed to do was to create conducive environment for them to work in and start something and make a real difference. We are excited about the ideas these two teams brought up and we will support them through MEST. We will continue to support agriculture through innovative ways,” he added.
On his part, the Corporate Affairs Director of Kosmos Ghana Mr. George Sarpong, challenged the youth to develop innovative products for agriculture at the 2017 edition of the KIC Challenge which was also launched at the venue.
According to him, “it will help improve the mechanization of agriculture to boost agriculture production in Ghana. This does not mean Kosmos will stop its other corporate social responsibilities. We will continue to play our role especially in western part of the country”.
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By: Obrempong Yaw Ampofo/citibusinessnews.com/Ghana
