Reinvent Agricultural Extension Services for the Digital Age

Government agricultural extension services in Nigeria are chronically underfunded and understaffed. Farmers who need advice on disease outbreaks, input prices, or new varieties often wait weeks or receive no help at all. Meanwhile, most adult Nigerians now own a basic mobile phone. Your challenge is to design a digital agricultural advisory service that a state Agricultural Development Programme could deploy at scale. It must work on feature phones (USSD or SMS), be available in at least one local language alongside English, and be sustainable without permanent government subsidy. Submit a service design document covering: the advisory model, how content is sourced and kept current, the technology architecture, a business or sustainability model, and a pilot plan for one state. Judging criteria: 40% practicality for low-bandwidth environments, 25% content quality and trust model, 20% sustainability, 15% local language integration.