Mobile stack/ Back-end & DevOps stack - Water Energy for Food: Grand Challenge for Development MENA Regional Innovation Hub

Background and Context

Water, energy and food are essential for human well-being, poverty reduction and sustainable development. Global projections indicate that the demand for freshwater, energy and food will increase significantly over the next decades under the pressure of population growth and mobility, economic development, international trade, urbanization, diversifying diets, cultural and technological changes and climate change.1 Agriculture accounts for 70% of total global freshwater withdrawals, making it the largest user of water. At the same time, the food production and supply chain consume about 30 percent of total energy consumed globally. However, the agricultural sector faces challenges in accessing renewable energy in low-income countries as significant barriers – that hinder the integration of renewable energy technology in agricultural development – exist. Likewise, renewable energy enterprises seeking to serve these farmers face a number of barriers such as limited access to debt, a remote client base or a lack of demand due to missing awareness. These issues create an unproductive cycle, in which suppliers and buyers are not connected, and farmers and agribusinesses are unable to leverage more cost-effective renewable energy technologies.

The above-described situation is expected to be exacerbated in the near future as 60% more food will need to be produced in order to feed the world population in 2050. Global energy consumption is projected to grow by up to 50% by 2035. Total global water withdrawals for irrigation are projected to increase by 10% by 2050. As demand grows, there is increasing competition for resources between water, energy, agriculture, fisheries, livestock, forestry, mining, transport and other sectors with unpredictable impacts for livelihoods of smallholders, women and youth working in the agricultural sector and the environment as a whole. Furthermore, these trends will also influence development in general. The creation of jobs, or improvement of those that exist, both within the agricultural sector but also jobs related to non-agricultural activities, can make a crucial contribution towards poverty reduction, food security and sustainable rural and urban development. Targeting women in the agricultural sector both as producers and consumers in this regard is of particular importance since they constitute nearly half of the agricultural workforce and up to 70% in many parts of the world. If women had the same access to resources as their male counterparts, they could increase yields by 20% to 30% and, in the process, feed up to 150 million more people.

The above situation is strongly pronounced in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Tackling issues in the water-energy-food nexus is imperative to achieve political and social stability, gender equality and inclusion, food security, prosperity and sustainable development in the MENA. Although the region’s water-energy-food challenges are severe, they present an opportunity for local innovators to find solutions for the most pressing water and energy issues in food production and agriculture.

Water & Energy for Food (WE4F): A Grand Challenge for Development is a joint international initiative of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the Foreign Ministry of the Netherlands, Sweden through the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), European Union (EU), and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) (herein after referred to as the “Donors”). Within this initiative the MENA Regional Innovation Hub (MENA RIH) supports innovators that work in the region and produce more food while using less water and energy, to impact food security, gender and poverty reduction in an environmentally sustainable way. Together with investors and partners, the MENA RIH works to scale mid-to-later stage enterprises that have an environmental and social impact in the water-energy-food nexus. The RIH MENA is implemented by a consortium (herein after referred to as the “Consortium” by Berytech (the leading organization and the contracting entity for this RFP), Chemonics Egypt Consultants, CEWAS, and the International Water Management Institute (IWMI).

The MENA RIH aims to support 50 innovators with a proven solution tackling water and/or energy issues in urban or rural food production. The MENA RIH for WE4F is designed to support innovators in the region in growing their business by tackling the most common internal and external challenges. By tackling matters related to business growth, technical aspects, environmental and social impact, and access to finance supported innovators will receive tailored and intense assistance to help them rapidly grow. The support includes technical assistance in numerous topics including

• developing strategic growth plan
• redesigning business model for growth and impact
• overcoming cashflow problems
• strengthening financial management foundations
• optimizing production processes and organizational structure
• improving ESG standing
• improving inclusion of BoP and women in business operations
• receiving more than 20 other growth support services such as export readiness, technical, and impact aspects

The MENA RIH will also assist innovators in raising investments, building partnerships, and expanding their networks. Some innovators will receive matching grants with a value reaching up to 300,000 USD.

Within the above context Berytech is seeking the assistance of a service provider to support “SOWIT” (a supported firm by RIH MENA) in developing the UI and UX of their mobile app serving farmers in Africa.

Innovator Description SOWIT

SOWIT specializes in precision agriculture by leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI), agronomy and remote-sensing to empower African farmers with farm-adapted plot-level precise insights, that optimize their most critical operations and sustainably intensify their yields. SOWIT’s technology is a cloud-based, crop-adaptive, non-invasive remote-sensing multi-devices solution that enables farmers to optimize water daily and support young farmers that do not necessarily have the experience or knowledge to face the increasing variability of weather and market, especially women that are already experiencing an information asymmetry.  SOWIT relies on more than 100 satellite-based vegetation indices to estimate the Kcb (Basal crop coefficient) and on historical databases consolidated both from ground truth (+ 12,000 points) and soil databases (Soil grids). SOWIT services are accessed through web-based and mobile phone-based applications. SOWIT expansion plan includes engaging large number of clients particularly at the base of the pyramid (BoP). This would require improvement in current platform user experience and user interface. 

• Details of the organization can be found on: SOWIT | Precision Agriculture
• For the Web App you may connect to sowit.app and create an account.
• The Mobile App is available on Google Play Store.
• Dedicated Tech Lead (SaaS) to liase between SOWIT and the service provider.
• Existing development team with mobile, front-end web and back-end developers.
• Development roadmap already defined based on complete technical diagnosis

Scope of work

Main Objective: As part of its growth path, one of SOWIT’s goals is to increase customer acquisition and farmer adoption of its technology across Africa. SOWIT's technology and services are provided through mobile and web applications. To achieve this goal, SOWIT aims to enhance the Back-end & DevOps stack of its mobile and web applications. The mobile application of SOWIT helps farmers taking decision on the ground based on insights and plot mapping while the web application plays more like a dashboard enabling most advanced farmers and enterprises to step back on the season. This should enable the backend of the application to run smoothly and effectively and front end to become as easy as possible to use by customers. The ultimate objective is to have an effective on-boarding of new customers as well as high retention of existing ones due to a fast and easy to use application. All work should take into consideration that targeted customers include Base of the Pyramid (BoP) farmers as well as women who might not be at ease with using web or phone-based applications. An optimized architecture will enable SOWIT to serve its customers with near real-time service delivery and provide its services through partners based on APIs.

The above will be achieved through the following

• Optimizing mobile stack (Android/Kotlin, room database, retrofit, map box) and enabling more responsiveness and fluidity;
• Improving back-end & DevOps stack (Django / Django Rest Framework, Postgres SQL, Docker, GIT), implementing architecture improvements and conducting unit testing;
• Supporting SOWIT development team to ensure better code review, unit testing implementation, best practices, app optimization (loading times, caching etc.)

Key features:

• Mobile stack (Android/Kotlin, room database, retrofit, map box)
• Back-end & DevOps stack (Django / Django Rest Framework, Postgres SQL, Docker, GIT)
• New architecture adapted to the multi-sided and asynchronistic service delivery (Api, Web Service, Mobile App, Processing chain…)

Key activities:

For both SOWIT Mobile and Web applications

• Validate the roadmap for both mobile app optimization and backend and DevOps stack 
• Code review to find out the limitations, code improvement, alternative solutions, knowledge transfer, team awareness, improve development process, avoid build breaks, share code ownership, track rationale, team assessment
  • Current code/de-bugging and revamp in the mobile side
  • Architecture rework on the back-end side
• Achieve the speed responses to backend
• Improvement and new infrastructure architecture
• Mobile aspect optimization of a code function and cleaning code
• Implementing new IT Infrastructure architecture
• Conducting unit and functional testing
• Ensure security system through the follow up of the audit of mobile app development

ESG Considerations:

The mobile app and web should be accessible and friendly to small holder farmers and women. The service provider is to demonstrate how they will also include women in the user testing and how feedback from women users would be included in the final Improvement and optimization  

Resources (team and material)

The service provider should have experience in mobile and back-end development and have a track record in Django for the Back-end and Kotlin for mobile front-end. The service provider need to demonstrate previous work related to architecture rebooting. The service provider will also work according to a technical roadmap provided by SOWIT.

Main Deliverables

1. A fully defined work plan using the WE4F work plan template and based on SOWIT technical development roadmap, provided to the selected support provider, which will be approved by the WE4F RIH MENA prior to the actual support delivery start. This work plan will lay out the activities, timeline for completion, and who is responsible from the support provider side and the innovator / client side and should be submitted within one week of contracting and after a kick-off meeting with the innovator.
2. Back-end guidance and support for architecture rework, optimization and testing led by SOWIT team to enable optimized SaaS (Web, Mobile, API) V3 full release. 
3. Mobile App and Web front-end development and update (Development, optimization, testing) based on SOWIT Wireframes (Figma) and on best SaaS practices (Web, Mobile) for SaaS V3 full release. 
4. Final audit report providing additional pathways for front-end, security, architecture and cloud services optimization (The audit will serve as a basis for SOWIT to establish following technical roadmap).