The 2018 Inspire Challenge
The Inspire Challenge encourages the use of big data approaches to advance agricultural research and development. The winners are groundbreaking innovations with real potential for developmental impact, have mobilized underused or misused data, and demonstrate meaningful partnerships with CGIAR and other sector members.
In 2018, we received over 130 proposals to our Inspire Challenges from applicants all over the world in the four Inspire Challenge categories: Revealing Food Systems, Monitoring Pests and Diseases, Disrupting Impact Assessment, and Empowering Data-Driven Farming.
Of the 130 excellent proposals for the Inspire Challenge 2018, we awarded five US$100,000 each to develop their innovative pilot projects.
Scale-up projects
In addition, the Platform awarded US$500,000 in total to three of the five winners from the 2017 challenge to help them expand the scale of their innovation. They had 12 months to implement their pilots and had to demonstrate the proven viability and potential for impact and present their results in front of a panel of judges to compete for the Scale-Up grant.
US$250,000 was awarded to the scale-up project that demonstrated the most significant impact and, in a surprise result, the CGIAR awarded an additional US$250,000 in grants, split between two runner-up projects due to the exceptional results achieved.
US$ TOTAL GRANT
TOTAL WINNERS
→ INSPIRE CHALLENGE 2018
WINNERS
US$ GRANT / WINNER
→ SCALE-UP 2018
SCALE UP RUNNERS
US$ GRANT / RUNNER
SCALE UP WINNER
US$ GRANT
Meet the Scale-up Winner and 2 Runners
Three of the five winners from the 2017 Inspire Challenge that had successfully implemented their pilot and demonstrated the viability of their innovation were awarded an additional “scale-up” grant in 2018 to help them expand the scale of their project.
US$250,000 was awarded to the project that demonstrated the most significant impact and, in a surprise result, the CGIAR awarded an additional US$250,000 to be split between two runner-up projects due to the exceptional results achieved.
Meet the 2018 winners
CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture’s 2018 Inspire Challenge winners were awarded during the Platform’s second annual convention — Decoding the Data Ecosystem — in Nairobi, Kenya, 3 to 5 October 2018.
The five winning teams have 12 months to implement small-scale proof of concept pilots to demonstrate viability.
The five successful pilots were placed on the trajectory to wider-scale implementation, including the possibility of receiving an additional US$250,000 of scale-up funding. They also have additional help in finding continued funding and widespread adoption within CGIAR, to ensure that these innovations become a part of how we operate system-wide. Read the winning proposals below.
