Technovation is a global competition that enables teams of girls to ideate a technological solution to a problem in their community they are passionate about solving, develop the application along with business plans to operate their project.
2020 marks my fourth year and fourth project with Technovation.
Given the experience I had from previous years, I wanted to create an application that is crucial to Cambodian’s everyday living and can efficiently help them to cope with the problems they truly struggle with. After careful research and discussions with my teammates, we decided to develop an application that will help to combat the issue of toxic usage of pesticides on vegetation by bringing reliable, affordable, and certified organic or safe vegetable shops to our users.
Therefore, we ideated an application called Chamkar, meaning farm in Khmer, which is an e-shop that allows our partnership shops to sell safe/organic vegetables by posting them. For clients, the shopping process is user-customized and designed for busy&non-expert clients to choose the healthiest vegetables efficiently. Chamkar offers two services (self-pickup & delivery) to fit all customer needs.
Check out our pitch video.
Here are some interfaces of the app that we designed.
As an entrepreneurship-enthusiast, I worked on mostly the business planning side of the team. The most remarkable part of this year’s journey is writing the complex business plan document that includes every component of our project’s descriptions, planning, business strategies, and more. It was my very first time writing a business plan; so I got to learn and explore new interesting parts to operating a business. For example, I needed to conduct numerous research on the problem and how it affects the livelihoods of Cambodians, customer profile, competitors and their market size, the number of potential customers and stakeholders and more. After gathering all relevant data and information, we use those to carefully analyze our market size, future expenditure, revenue and profits, and the overall potential of our project.
Click here to see the full 24-page document of Chamkar’s business plan.
After finishing our project, we presented a pitch of Chamkar in a National Pitch event and submitted it to the global judges.
We qualified as a semifinalist globally and here is the certificate.
Overall, I loved this journey just as much as I loved any other technovation projects before this, if not more. It was a unique experience working on a project amidst a pandemic. It taught me a lot of things such as: soft skills including communications (with local organic shops, farmers, users), collaboration, flexibility, problem-solving and more, technical and entrepreneurial skills including researching and analyzing data, writing a formal business plan, public speaking and pitching skills, etc.
Just as any project, it leaves me with new and precious experiences of exploring a brand-new field, talking to different people and experts, bonding with fellow friends and teammates, and more.
Thanks to Technovation, I got to improve my entrepreneurship skills and got to develop a solution to help my community while learning numerous new things myself.