The problem
Currently, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, people in quarantine are limited to movements in a small area, which makes it difficult for them to buy goods. Furthermore, loneliness is deteriorating their psychological health in a way they have never experienced before.
At the same time, small and medium-size local producers (e.g farmers) produce goods they aren't able to sell. A lot of those products have limited expiration dates and, currently, cannot reach their potential customers on time and, instead end up in landfills.
The solution
We introduce an application, whose main features are connecting groups of people based on their geographical surroundings, emphasizing local production, giving information about the products and protection of vulnerable groups.
Based on your location, it gives you information about your geographical surroundings such as hospitals, local test centers, and local producers e.g. farmers.
It allows information filtering based on your interests and needs. For example, you can filter farmers based on the products they offer, their expiration date, and whether they offer a delivery or not, which is especially applicable to vulnerable groups. This model allows people to remain healthy and wealthy.
Our solution allows farmers to easily tell their local community what they offer, so you don’t need to worry where your farmer is located and what they sell. Contactless delivery is our bread and butter, we save you time and farmers money.
We radically improve fresh produce delivery, which in turn encourages people to stay at home. We know supermarkets are one of the last places people meet in groups, we would like to change that and allow those most endangered to distance from others.
In order to tackle the psychological part of the problem, it offers news feed of local events to help people socialize (such as clapping on the balconies in Spain, etc.). If no such event exists in the surroundings we encourage users to create one.
One of the highly valuable lesson-learned from this crisis is that tackling problems alone is not effective enough. There is an absolute need to connect and cooperate in order to alleviate economic strain and be beneficial for the mental health of the population.
What we've done during the weekend
After we finalized our idea we approached local stakeholders (local farmers, authorities) and directly involved them in the application development. First, we made an extensive survey, which was the basis of our feature implementation. We kept in contact during app development to get lightning-fast feedback.
Having created a prototype we then evaluated our value proposition and future roadmap. [1]
Impact to the crisis
Our solution encourages people to stay at home and stop the spread of coronavirus. It helps local stakeholders sell their products and survive this crisis.
Furthermore, it enhances social wellbeing of local communities and diminishing psychological effect of the lockdown.
Our solution contributes to the following Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs):
- 1 & 2: Reducing poverty and hunger
- 3: good health and well-being
- 11: sustainable cities and communities
With further development, our solution is intended to meet even more SDGs.
To continue with the project we need
- continued mutual development with our end-users - local farmers
- mentorship, backend developers, software designers, and funding
- the political will to have it implemented at an international scale
- support from all stakeholders, internationally to deploy the solution globally
After the crisis
Our solution is easily expandable allowing it to quickly implement new functionalities, such as for example government information services. It's not expensive to develop and can be easily put into service.
Our solution is based on creating strong societies that are capable of tackling not only this particular crisis but to even tackle or prevent future ones.
By just changing a few basic parameters we can tackle different crises, such as earthquakes, floods, etc.
However, the most important part of our solution is that it meets and supports sustainable development goals, such as social cohesion, human dignity, people and environmentally-friendly driven economy, financial security, and sustainability.
[ 1 ]: Our roadmap currently looks as such:
- finalize the application with the features applicable to the current crisis,
- tightly integrate into small local communities
- deploy nationally
- deploy internationally
- add features applicable to life after the crisis
We'd like to thank everyone that helped put this event together, especially our wonderful mentor Evgenia Koroneou.
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