Starting from the desire to help farmers in solving problems, the LABORAN Team was able to win 1st place in GEMASTIK (National Student Exhibition in Information and Communication Technology) at the University of Indonesia. The team consisting of Ekananda Putri Nurafandi and Muhammad Fathir Alhakim is a team under the auspices of the EI Lab (Entrepeneurship and Innovation Laboratory) FIA UB. Initiating applications that bridge farmers with potential market segments, LABORAN was able to eliminate hundreds of teams from all universities in Indonesia in the ICT Business Development category.
According to Ekananda, the real problem they want to solve is related to the welfare of farmers. From the data he got, the number of working groups that have grown these foodstuffs in the last 17 years has decreased. In fact, according to the United Nations, the world's population is predicted to reach 8.5 billion people in 2030. This means that the need for food will actually increase. "It turns out that the problem lies in the low welfare of farmers," said Ekananda.
The Laboratory Team assumed that farmers' low income was due to their ignorance of market prices and also the distribution chain being too long. Initially, the team wanted to try to cut the distribution chain, but it turned out that it was difficult to achieve because the market apparently already had its own system. So the only easiest solution is to help farmers in getting market segments that were previously not targeted by farmers, but have high purchasing potential.
Until now, the application has been able to accommodate 15 joining farmer groups, with a total of 1,500 farmers. Apart from that, the success of this application is also proven by the success of business flow simulations that have been carried out in collaboration with several restaurants in Malang City.
GEMASTIK 2017 which was held on November 4 2017 is a program of the Directorate of Learning and Student Affairs (Belmawa) of the Ministry of Research, Technology and Higher Education. This program was held as an effort to improve the quality of students as agents of change in advancing ICT and its use in Indonesia.
