Through this Regional AgriTech Challenge, Compete Caribbean is looking to provide technical assistance to selected Caribbean firms to:

 1) Create or adapt innovative products and services that may be based on cutting-edge technologies; 

2) Improve their processes and scale their business models in ways that contribute to improvements in agricultural productivity; 

3) Address challenges related to distribution and sales of agricultural and agro-processed products;

 4) And/or to improve access to finance to smallholder farmers; 

S) Help adapt or mitigate climate change in ways that are significant and game-changing for a particular crop or for the region.

The Caribbean region faces major challenges to improve the competitiveness and sustainability of the agriculture sector. Growth in agricultural productivity has been slow and the sector suffers from low access to credit, high trade costs and a low capacity to comply with modern food safety and quality standards. Therefore, the sector has been unable to adequately respond to rapidly growing demand for high-standard agri-food products from the tourism, processing, and retailing sectors — both within and outside the region. Instead, the growing demand by these sectors in the region is mainly fulfilled by imports. The region’s agricultural sector is also constrained by large and increasing pressures on natural resources and a high vulnerability to climate change.

• Reducing the risks and the costs associated with deploying Internet of Things (10T)-based farm management solutions that can reduce water and pesticide usage
• End-to-end digital farmer advisory services that can help smallholders improve farming practices, achieve higher yields, adapt to climate change, reduce costs and improve access to markets
• The need to meet increasingly strict traceability and certification criteria for the most demanding export markets
• The smart monitoring of equipment, such as irrigation systems that enable farmers to remotely control, track and look after their equipment and farming operations, leading to a reduction in water consumption and waste.

Eligible applicants include individual private sector firms (from startups to mature firms), consortia, joint ventures or clusters, of which the lead private sector member must be registered for at least three years in at least one of the 13 Compete Caribbean beneficiary countries”. In cases where non-profit or non-governmental organizations are part of a consortia, JV or cluster, the lead organization must be a private sector firm registered in the Caribbean.

Selected firms will receive up to USD$120,000 in non-reimbursable technical assistance grants to implement their AgriTech project in one of the 13 beneficiary countries. The grant amount requested should not represent more than 50% of the total budget necessary to implement the project successfully – up to a maximum of US$120,000. The company or cluster proposing the solution should commit the other 50% of the budget through counterpart contribution, half of
which must be in cash. For example, if the total project budget is USD $240,000 or more: $120,000 can be obtained from Compete Caribbean as technical assistance grants, and the remaining should be financed from counterpart contributions, with at least $60,000 in cash, and the remaining $60,000 in-kind (or more).