Giving Compass' Take:

• AgriPredict is an app that helps Zambian farmers detect certain pests and diseases that destroy their crops. The app won the UN Food and Agriculture Organization sponsored hackathon. 

• Technology is permeating many different industries as more social entrepreneurs are creating tools and software to help people in need. What other industries can you find positive tech influence? 

• Read about the relationship between technology and philanthropy. 

Experts say keeping young people in farming is key to alleviating hunger in Africa, which has 65% of the world's uncultivated arable land, but spends $35 billion a year on importing food for its growing population.

Eight teams competed in the hackathon, organised by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and a Rwandan trade organisation in the country's capital Kigali this week.

Among the proposed solutions were an app that links aspiring farmers with land owners in Senegal and a Nigerian mobile platform that uses blockchain to help farmers demonstrate their creditworthiness to lenders.

The winner was AgriPredict, an app already operating in Zambia that that can help farmers identify diseases and pests - including the voracious fall armyworm, which eats crops and has wreaked havoc in much of sub-Saharan Africa.

"We noticed there were no tools whatsoever that will help farmers mitigate or prevent or even counter these diseases so we came up with this idea of creating a software to help farmers," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Read the full article about app to help farmers by Thin Lei Win at Global Citizen