On the 22nd and 23rd of November, 2022, the second edition of the Zenith Bank Tech Fair – Future Forward 2.0 was held at the Eko Convention Centre, Eko Hotels & Suites, Victoria Island, Lagos.
The 2-day event featured presentations on leading technological innovations that span different aspects of life and multiple industries. On the second day of the fair, a hackathon session themed “Future Forward 2.0” was hosted, where 11 finalists who emerged out of 500 contestants competed for the grand prize of 20 million Naira and mentorship with Seedstars, a company that implements high-quality capacity-building programs for entrepreneurs in emerging markets.
Ecotutu emerged as the overall winner of the hackathon session of the Tech Fair and we walked away with the 20 million Naira cash prize and mentorship program.
This win is timely as it provides us with the enablement to drive our mission to reduce post-harvest loss in Africa by accelerating unhindered access to cold storage solutions and our latest project attests to that.
“As much as man exists in this world, we need to keep eating and preserving the food we produce. So we won’t get out of business any time because we need to keep preserving food, people need to eat.”
– Babajide Oluwase, CEO, Ecotutu
A few weeks ago we acquired a space in the largest vegetable market in Africa, Mile 12 Market, to build a solar-powered cold room to preserve beef and horticultural produce thereby enabling farmers, sellers, and aggregators that patronise the food market to curb food waste, increase profitability by optimising against panic sales, and significantly reduce their carbon footprint. The prize money from the Zenith Tech Fair would go a long way in making this possible. It would serve as a means to accelerate deployment. The plan is to kick off operation by January 2023.
Some of the other company goals that would be accelerated include the design and implementation of a post-harvest handling training program for farmers and other stakeholders in the value chain, and the onboarding of more cooling truck partners.
Congratulations to the first runner-up Foris Labs, Finva and all the other finalists, thank you for your efforts to solve the problems that you have identified.
