This post originally appeared on ICTworks.

Do you want to show the power of big data analytics in agriculture? Can you analyze big data to reveal new ways to reduce hunger and poverty? Are you working on digital technologies that push the limits of data-driven science for impact?

Apply now for the CGIAR Big Data Inspire Challenge, which has $500,000 in initial grant funding to help you transform agriculture development in four broad focus areas:

• Revealing Food System Flows: Mapping and monitoring food system flows to inform policy-makers and problem-solvers
• Monitoring Pests & Diseases: Creating innovative disease diagnostic tools to alert on crop, livestock and fish threats
• Disrupting Impact Assessment: Applying new tools to unchain impact assessment for agriculture research for development
• Empowering Data-Driven Farming: Bringing together data streams to have a positive impact on agronomic decision-making

Grant Funding Deadline: August 20, 2018

Winning teams who develop robust responses to climate change, disease, and land degradation challenges will receive $100,000 at the CGIAR Big Data in Agriculture Convention, October 3-5 in Nairobi, Kenya. To encourage long-term adoption and easy access to our data, teams must include a CGIAR center and include a non-CGIAR entity of any type.

Teams will have 12 months to implement small-scale proof of concept pilots to demonstrate viability. Successful pilots will be placed on the trajectory to wider-scale implementation, including possibly receiving $250,000 in scale-up funding and additional help in finding widespread adoption within CGIAR.

CGIAR Grant Funding Eligibility

Inspire Challenges are about solving big problems using next-generation ideas. We’re looking for bold, novel ideas that leverage the expansion of big data and digital technologies to unlock new scientific discoveries or enhance the agriculture development enterprise that contain one of these themes:

• Data Use: Combines multiple data sources and adds value to them through data fusion or analysis, mobilizing underused or misused data – especially CGIAR data.
• Scale: The project has potential to serve the needs of a growing user base and the interface is well designed and specific to the problem, with the data, procedure for use, and code base well documented.
• Impact: Enhances stakeholder ability to make decisions problem statement, rationale, process and outputs of the product clearly support decision making affecting the farm level.
• Sustainability: Narrative clearly indicates hardware, software, human resources required to install/maintain/run the product, and good documentation is provided.
• Innovation: Proposal is a real game changer with the potential to transform food systems. It is not basic research nor solely targeted towards sustaining ongoing research.
• Pitch: Pitch and demonstration is compelling, well organised, and clearly illustrates the relationship of the problem to the proposed solution.