Ocean Protocol supports Grow Asia to empower communities
The first airdrop of Ocean Protocol Tokens will happen with our participation in Grow Asia Hackathon 2018.
We would definitely be thrilled if, beyond tokenomics and economy of data, the worth of Ocean Protocol in the near future will be measured proportionally to the impact it will have had in creating new paradigms for society and for people in their daily lives.
We are not limiting the meaning of Ocean Protocol community to the supporters of the project or its contributors. We wish to include all the communities out there that can benefit from the impact of data sharing for good, catalysed by the project. We are looking at micro and macro opportunities for sustaining livelihoods, improving the quality of life of people, impacting life outcomes, levelling the playing field for social inclusion, and mobility, helping the environment and more.
It would be such a waste to have to wait even one day longer than necessary for this impact to be felt and, for this reason, the initiatives that will be shaped around the development of the Ocean Protocol will have ‘real life’ impact as a priority right from the start.
Data sharing has been getting bad press due to abuses by centralized solutions in relation to the people who helped them grow. In contrast, we’re only starting to tap the immense potential and positive power of secure blockchain-based decentralized sharing. It will be our job to facilitate real-life use cases that will showcase how sharing data for good is not only possible, but desirable and meaningful for society.
In line with this ethos, we are delighted to share with you that the first airdrop of Ocean Protocol Tokens will happen with our participation as Tech Partner in Grow Asia Hackathon 2018.
Established by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with the ASEAN Secretariat, Grow Asia brings together companies, governments, NGOs, and other stakeholders to help smallholder farmers improve their production and livelihood through access to information, knowledge, markets, and finance.
Grow Asia Helps Smallholder Farmers while Protecting Forests & Protecting Biodiversity
In the same way digitisation is transforming and disrupting many industries, it has the potential to dramatically change the way 10 million smallholder farmers in Southeast Asia manage their plots and crops. Helping these smallholders access information, credit and services and adopt sustainable production practices not only delivers improvements to their livelihoods, but can also result in more sustainable outcomes, especially in relation to oil palm cultivation.
“Although oil palm cultivation can improve the livelihoods of many smallholders, the expansion of oil palm cultivation has also led to increased concerns about deforestation, loss of biodiversity, increased greenhouse gas emissions and land rights conflicts. Consequently, the need for sustainable production practices, intended to result in higher yields, better prices, and reduced social and environmental damage, has become more apparent and has gained increasing attention.”
This is the reason why Grow Asia focuses on independent smallholders: they have a significant role in the expansion of oil palm cultivation onto marginal lands or those not officially zoned for agriculture, and thus are a growing driver of deforestation and the resulting loss of biodiversity and increased greenhouse gas emissions.
How can the creative and skillful use of data assets have a positive impact in this context? Participants will explore how data that is already collected by various ecosystem actors can be used to achieve better efficiency and productivity, and demonstrate how data sharing can be done at scale.
Ocean Protocol uses blockchain technology to allow data to be shared and transferred in a secure and transparent manner. By enabling a decentralized platform and network that connects providers and consumers of valuable data, Ocean Protocol offers developers controlled access to build services. This was not possible before due to the various barriers to sharing data under a centralized model.Ocean Protocol is pushing the boundaries to deliver implementable and scalable means for data sharing worldwide, and projects like Grow Asia are just the first step in this amazing journey of transformation.
Paradoxically, technology is the easiest barrier to overcome for this revolution. The hardest barrier lies in people’s mindset and it can only be conquered by our continuous demonstration of the positive impact data sharing can bring to our society and by educating an entire generation of data scientists, regulators and enterprises alike about the dissolution of obstacles that were making scalable, data driven innovation impossible.
The ecosystem activation that Ocean Protocol sets to achieve has the broadest mandate: Mobilize data-sharing communities for communities that can be transformed by data sharing.
A workshop was held at LEVEL3 (Ocean Protocol’s Singapore HQ) on the 12th of April, with 120 attendees representing research institutes, startups, SMEs, enterprise teams and government agencies. To date, we expect in excess of 200 registrants for the Hackathon. It is heartwarming to see such a positive reception for such an important initiative. We will keep everyone up to date with the progress of the teams as they work through the stages of the event starting from the 20th of April to the Presentation Day on the 23rd, when the selection of applications and platforms for further development and support will be announced.
Unilever, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), and Bayer will use the innovation and insights brought by the participants to help smallholders access information, credit, and services and adopt sustainable production practices, improving their livelihoods and producing more sustainable outcomes. The collaboration will enable and accelerate the access to data collected by various ecosystem actors, including The Weather Company and Planet, but had not been shared to-date.
Like the other partners and supporters of Grow Asia’s work, Ocean Protocol wants for this to be a meaningful initiative with tangible results. The selected applications and platforms combined with the commitment from partners to help operationalise the outputs will accelerate Grow Asia’s path to create a positive impact for 10 million farmers by 2020.
This is exactly the type of outcomes we would like to achieve globally, over and over again, thanks to the active involvement of the Ocean Protocol ecosystem.
For this reason, in addition to the highly valuable go-to-market support, each winner will receive cash awards and an equivalent amount in Ocean Protocol Tokens when they deploy their application or platform on the Ocean Protocol Network, which we expect to be in Q1 2019. Aside from engineering support, the winners will also receive Data Analytics, AI and Blockchain guidance to help deliver their application or platform.
We will do our best to help them transform their concepts and designs into a real-life products built for impact.
More Information about Grow Asia Hackathon 2018
1st prize S$5,000 | 2nd prize S$3,000 |3rd prize S$2,000 | Special prizes 2 x S$500
Organiser: Grow Asia
Main Partners: Unilever and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG)
Supporting Partner: Bayer
Tech Partners: Ocean Protocol, The Weather Company, Planet
Pre-reading: https://growasiahackathon.com/pre-reads/
Dataset: https://growasiahackathon.com/dataset/
Experts and judges: https://growasiahackathon.com/hackathon/
First Theme: Data sharing
Many companies, including technology startups offering SaaS solutions, are addressing the issue of “traceability” to help Buyers trace back to a known catchment area around a mill. They are collecting and recording data, and are analysing the immediate area around a mill, for example, to reveal useful information regarding the plantations, the farmers, and the middlemen (agents and traders).
The opportunity exists for ecosystem actors to form partnerships to create new solutions that benefit the smallholders, if they can better appreciate the value of complementary data and have the incentive to share their data.
CHALLENGE
How might we design a data application or platform and an appropriate business model, for example to share or use the provenance or traceability data, for the mutual benefit of the ecosystem actors as well as the smallholders?
Second Theme: Productivity
Low productivity is a key factor leading to smallholders growing larger areas of under-productive oil palm rather than intensifying production. Independent smallholders perform 40% below good agricultural scenarios for smallholders and 116% below company plantation scenarios. Thus, improving productivity is also key to improving their livelihoods.
Training and technical assistance in crop protection, fertilisers, quality seedlings, etc. are essential for sustainable improvement for the long term. Together with access to information (like weather) that is up-to-date and locally relevant, training will increase smallholder productivity and efficiency. However, there have been challenges in training, because of access and literacy.
CHALLENGE
How might we provide the right information and training to smallholders, so they become more productive and efficient, which in turn aid the sustainable intensification of their plantations?
Third Theme: Financing
Smallholders are often too small for commercial banks and too large for micro-finance schemes. Almost half of them don’t have a bank account. They do not have credit history, cannot supply reliable management information, or present a formal land title which could be used as collateral to access finance.
They are only able to access informal credit — with high interest terms and short tenure, but comes with high convenience and flexibility — from their direct buyer (agent or trader), most to manage their day-to-day living needs.
CHALLENGE
How might we devise a new credit scoring mechanism for banks (such as MUFG) or commodity buyers (such as Unilever) to extend credit to smallholder farmers based on data on their crops or on-farm behaviours / investments?
Fourth Theme: Logistics
Fresh fruit bunches (FFB) must be delivered to a mill and processed within 48 hours after harvest before significant yield loss. Smallholders who do not have their own means of transport rely on local traders or the closest mill. Thus, in some regions, there is only one logistically feasible direct buyer (agent, trader, or mill).
Trucks can pick up the FFB whilst delivering agriculture inputs, such as crop protection products (from Bayer, for example) and fertilisers, to the individual smallholders. But the volume of the cargo to and from each smallholder is small. There is scope for improved efficiency in coordination and movement, which could reduce logistics costs and improved access to essential inputs.
Poor road conditions (sometimes made worse by seasonal weather) and long waiting lines at the mills (often coupled with a lack of visibility of waiting times) have big impacts on transport time and FFB quality at the mill gate.
CHALLENGE 1
How might we improve the timeliness of price and other information, so smallholders can make informed decisions on when and who (agent or trader) to sell their FFB?
CHALLENGE 2
How might we enable transport providers to be more efficient in organising and coordinating deliveries of agriculture inputs and FFB in any given local area?
Let’s transform communities together
If you are interested in taking part in the Grow Asia Hackathon 2018, there is still space for new sign-ups. Research institutes, startups, SMEs, and enterprise teams are welcome to participate. If your enterprise is not based in Singapore but you would like to find out how you can be involved, please send an email to the organisers Padang & Co info@padang.co. If you would like to discuss how Ocean Protocol can help, please contact us communications@oceanprotocol.com
