Kyrgyzstan at the Future Agro Challenge: A Greenhouse Finalist and a Global Award

In June 2015, KG Labs organized the first Future Agro Challenge competition in Kyrgyzstan — and in Central Asia. The Future Agro Challenge is a global agri-tech startup competition that selects national host organizations across multiple continents; in 2015, Kyrgyzstan was one of ten countries chosen to run a national round, alongside Chile, Greece, Israel, Morocco, Pakistan, Palestine, Peru, Russia, and Sudan. The competition ran on June 20–21 at the Uglovoy coworking space on Panfilov Street in Bishkek. A dedicated Facebook page — facebook.com/kgfutureagro — was set up for the program before KG Labs had even launched its own official page.

By the end of the process, a Bishkek entrepreneur named Tilek Toktogaziev had been selected to represent Kyrgyzstan at the international finals in Athens. A year later, at the Global Entrepreneurship Congress in Medellin, Colombia, KG Labs received 3rd place for Host of the Year — its first international award.

The Competition

The national round at Uglovoy drew applicants from across the country — including from Osh, Issyk-Kul, and Naryn oblasts — with twenty projects submitted and evaluated by a professional jury. Competition categories covered nine areas of agricultural innovation: Always Green practices, Food and Health, Agro-logistics, Farmer Income, Education, Agro-tourism, Safety and Health, Packaging, and Other. Applications were accepted in Kyrgyz, Russian, or English; the winning team needed at least one English-speaking member to be eligible for the international round.

KG Labs framed the competition not only as a talent search but as a diagnostic. As Aziz Soltobaev noted at the time: “Entrepreneurs from multiple regions participated, demonstrating growing awareness of technological innovation opportunities.” Jury member Esen Rysbekov added: “We need significant information campaigns about agricultural innovations and startups transforming the industry.” The subtext was clear — the competition had surfaced ideas that existed in the regions but had no prior channel to reach a national or international stage.

2015 FAC National Hosts
Chile
Greece
Israel
Kyrgyzstan
Morocco
Pakistan
Palestine
Peru
Russia
Sudan

Tilek Toktogaziev and the Greenhouse Project

Tilek Toktogaziev was in his second year of running a greenhouse business when he entered the competition. His project — a system for controlling humidity and temperature in greenhouses to reduce the cost of vegetable cultivation — addressed a specific structural challenge in Kyrgyzstan’s agricultural sector: controlled-environment farming is one of the few ways to extend the growing season in a mountainous country with significant climatic variability, but the operating costs of maintaining greenhouse conditions had remained a barrier to scale.

The jury selected his project to represent Kyrgyzstan at the Future Agro Challenge international finals in Athens, Greece, in October 2015. Travel and accommodation were funded by UNDP’s Green Village program. At the international level, Toktogaziev also later presented on the prospects of greenhouse business at a competition in Colombia — the same country where KG Labs would receive its Host of the Year recognition at the GEC in Medellin.

Medellin, March 2016: Host of the Year

The 3rd place Host of the Year award from the 2016 Global Entrepreneurship Congress was announced on March 15, 2016, at the Plaza Mayor Convention and Exhibition Center in Medellin — the annual gathering of the Global Entrepreneurship Network (GEN), which coordinates the FAC program globally. The award recognized the quality of KG Labs’ hosting: the organization of the national round, the participant experience, and the standard of applications it had produced.

It was KG Labs’ first international recognition, and it came through a sector — agriculture — that rarely appeared in Central Asia’s then-emerging startup conversation. That a Bishkek-based startup organization had run a credible agri-tech competition drawing participants from three oblasts, selected a technically coherent finalist, and managed the national process well enough to place third globally among ten competing host countries was a signal of institutional capacity as much as of agricultural ambition.

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