A group of Jamaican developers won top regional honours in a regional hackathon, held as part of the Caribbean Week of Agriculture in Suriname.

Team Node420 beat seven other teams of young developers in the #agrihack, held in Paramaribo from October 5 to 9.

Their winning app is designed to give farmers real-time weather analysis, allowing more efficient agricultural planning.

The Guyanese Minister of Agriculture presented the 5,000 Euro prize.

A team from Barbados walked away with 4,000 Euros—presented by the Director General of  the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture—for their app. Called Crop Guard, it aims to enhance food security by helping farmers to protect their crops through pest diagnosis, monitoring and control.

Third-place winners Unicode of Suriname received a 3,000-Euro prize from Michael Hailu, director of event organisers, the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation ACP-EU (CTA)​.

Contestants presented their products before a regional panel and an audience that included participants of the Caribbean Week of Agriculture.

Each team competing at the regional event worked with a tech hub, an organisation that gave the team advice and helped them to fine-tune the apps they developed.

Node420 was supported by SlashRoots, Crop Guard were supported by the National Council for Science and Technology of Barbados, while Unicode  got help from Telesur Multimedia Innovation Laboratory.

Those tech hubs also won 3000 Euros each, to facilitate business incubation for the top three winners.

The AgriHack Talent Caribbean was organised by the CTA and various partners to support youth ICT innovations and entrepreneurship in agriculture. This activity is supported by the Agriculture, Rural Development and Youth in the Information Society (ARDYIS) project of CTA.

Eight teams from six Caribbean countries were at the finals. In addition to the regional prizes, each won 800 Euros, as the national-level prize.

The three regional winners are now looking forward to six months of business incubation, also part of the prize-package, during which time they will have access to guidance and support to develop their winning business ideas.

From T&T Guardian