Locations
'It's Just Too Good To Waste' Food Waste Hackathon
Objectives
The aim of this initiative was to raise awareness on the food waste issue in Cyprus, and promote idea-generation in civil society and among residents on food waste-reducing practices that can address this issue, contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). More specifically, the project’s objective was to increase awareness, encourage bi-communal cooperation in addressing common issues of environmental concern and fast-track testing of innovative sustainable solutions for reduction of island-wide food waste in Cyprus.
Following UNDP’s Innovation Challenge modality, UNDP Cyprus put together a Hackathon, with the support of CyprusInno. The 2.5-day hackathon brought together a range of people from across Cyprus who, through a series of workshops, were supported to create teams and develop ideas to address food waste. The top three teams with the most innovative, replicable and sustainable ideas were shortlisted as finalists. In the second phase of this initiative, from April to May 2023, the three teams were supported through a series of mentoring sessions to further develop their ideas, which were reviewed and evaluated by UNDP. The selected final team won a €10,000 seed-funding to implement their idea.
Results
An island-wide open call was published calling for people from both communities to partake in the 2.5-day hackathon in the buffer zone. From the 54 applications, UNDP selected 35 participants for the hackathon. 29 participants attended the 2.5-day hackathon.
The Hackathon took place between 17-19 March 2023, starting with an interactive panel event on the 17th eve, which was open to the public. The evening started with welcome messages by the event contributors, Ambassador Martin Hagström of Sweden, Ambassador Anke Schlimm of Germany, Myrto Zambarta, Head of the Representation of the European Commission in Cyprus and Jakhongir Khaydarov, Head of Office UNDP Cyprus.
The panel discussion included four prominent speakers from the Cypriot Food Waste ecosystem: Sara Mariza Vryonidi - Project Coordinator at Friends of the Earth Cyprus and of LIFE-FOODPRINT; Deren Sanivar - Outreach Coordinator at Zero Food Waste Cyprus; Malvina Nicolaou - Founder of RescuedBox; Elias Moustakas - IKEA Cyprus Food and Beverage Manager. The discussion was closed by a Q&A session where participants and members of the audience asked the panellists questions to assist with ideation later.
The next two days included a series of workshops led by innovation specialists and experts on food waste. The initiative was designed for people to generate innovative and sustainable solutions as well as ‘hack’ existing and new mechanisms for the food waste problem in Cyprus. Participants had the chance to attend 5 different workshops.
On the first day (18th March), workshops focused on business model canvas, introduction to latest Information and Communication technologies, teambuilding and design thinking methodology to guide them on team building, ideation, as well as proposal development. The rest of the day was left for the teams to start their collaboration and work on their ideas. The second (19th March) day started with a pitching workshop to support the teams with presentation skills. The teams then had the remaining of the morning and early afternoon to continue and finalise their work as well as prepare for the pitching of their idea.
Towards 17:00PM, teams were asked to stop their work and assemble to start their pitches. The teams presented to a pre-selected high-level jury panel. The jury panel included representatives from the Embassy of Sweden, the Embassy of Germany, the European Commission and UNDP Cyprus. Experts from CyprusInno and Microsoft were also present to advise the panel. This panel composition brought together the expertise of UNDP as well as other partners leading on food waste reduction, together with the technical knowledge of organisations working in the field of innovation and development, in order to ensure the selection of the most viable solutions. A list of pre-defined evaluation criteria was used for the shortlisting of the top three (3) teams as finalists. The evaluation criteria focused on financial sustainability; long-term viability; scalability; and accessibility of the developed ideas, taking into full consideration the UNDP innovation challenge policy into full consideration.
The three finalist teams were assigned expert support (up to four (4) two-hour mentoring sessions) for turning their ideas into a feasible project proposal. Their revised project ideas were evaluated by UNDP and the highest scoring idea was selected for seed funding of 10,000 EUR.
The team selected for the 10,000 EUR seed funding have been working tierlessly to initiate their proposal into action.
Read more about the winning team and their actions HERE !
