myAgro: elevating farmers out of poverty

My name is Anushka, I am the Founder and CEO of myAgro. I have worked in rural Africa since mid-2008, helping to increase food security and market access for small-scale farmers. Prior to starting myAgro, I developed key components of One Acre Fund’s core operation model, created management-training programs and traveled across Africa and South Asia in search of innovations in the microfinance and agricultural sectors. Before joining One Acre Fund, I was an early employee of Kiva.org and created the Kiva Fellows Program. I received my BA in Literature from University of California, Santa Cruz and my agricultural training from smallholder farmers in Bungoma, Kenya. I am a 2018 winner of the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, a 2018 Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, a 2011 – 2013 Rainer Arnhold Fellow, a 2013 DRK Foundation Social Entrepreneurship Fellow, and a 2012 Echoing Green Fellow.

Problem: myAgro aims to solve the problem of poverty for smallholder farmers in Sub Saharan Africa. myAgro enables smallholder farmers to lift themselves, their families, and their communities out of poverty. Proposing: myAgro has pioneered a unique mobile layaway payment platform that enables farmers to set aside small amounts of money toward the purchase of high-quality seed, fertilizer, tools, and agricultural training using their cell phones. myAgro then delivers the inputs and training when the layaway payments are completed.  In 2021, we aim to serve 120,000 farmers. Elevating Humanity: myAgro’s three-tiered approach is working, and has already enabled over 62,000 farmers to double their harvests and incomes. myAgro’s North Star is to reach 1 million smallholder farmers by 2025 and help them increase their income by $1.50 per farmer per day. Furthermore, we are now working closely with national governments, having signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Mali’s Government.

Problem working to solve: Without financing or quality inputs, farmers plant with limited fertilizer, and out-dated tools and methods, resulting in low yields, food insecure communities and generational poverty. With the right support, family farmers could become critical actors in promoting global food security, environmental sustainability, and economic growth in the developing world. With 1.6 billion smallholder farmers worldwide, responsible for growing over 80% of the world’s food supply, the scale of this problem is global. Problem/people affected: Hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers continue to live in extreme poverty, with rural areas accounting for 79% of the world’s total poor. Contributing factors: The root cause of this entrenched poverty is that many farming households lack affordable access to quality fertilizer, improved seeds and training needed to increase their harvests and incomes. Governments, donors and the private-sector have often struggled to find mechanisms to provide effective assistance to this vast population. As a result, without access to banks or formal financial institutions, farmers cannot put away money or take out loans. When planting season comes, they often do not have enough cash on hand to afford the quality inputs that would ensure a better harvest. myAgro solves for this.

myAgro’s solution is a simple yet revolutionary financial tool: mobile layaway. By purchasing myAgro scratch cards from a local sales agent or paying directly through their mobile phones, farmers pay little by little, in advance for myAgro-supplied inputs (seeds and fertilizer) and training. Each payment accumulates in the farmer’s myAgro account, allowing households to finance their seeds and fertilizer, in increments as small as $1. Before planting time, myAgro delivers each farmer’s package of high-quality seeds and fertilizer to a distribution point in their village. Finally, myAgro agents provide on-farm follow up and basic agricultural training to help farmers best use the new inputs. myAgro’s 3-tiered approach of mobile layaway, input delivery, and training has proven effective in increasing harvests. myAgro knows its solution is making progress. In just seven years, myAgro has scaled its approach from 240 farmers in 2012 to 62,000 farmers in 2019 in Senegal, Mail and Tanzania. These farmers increased their yields by 50 to 100 percent and incomes by more than 50 percent.

The group that myAgro seeks to serve is Subsaharan-African rural smallholder farmers living in poverty, notably women. Traditionally, this population has lacked access to financial services, private input markets, and basic agricultural tools and training. More specifically, myAgro’s target client is a rural, smallholder farmer who: lives on less than $2 per day; relies on their farms as a source of food and household income; and lacks access to formal financing, quality inputs, and agricultural training that would help them increase harvests. Additionally, more than 60% of myAgro farmers are women. Through surveys, focus groups and working closely with local women’s savings groups and communities, myAgro has designed its solutions with women in mind. We understand that women: have less ability to travel to urban or peri-urban centers to purchase inputs; want to buy in smaller quantities; and are less able to afford a large one-time cost. For these reasons, this sizable customer base remains largely ignored by both input supply companies and traditional financial institutions. In contrast, myAgro's mobile layaway platform fits in with women's existing saving habits, allowing them to save little by little over time and to purchase and receive inputs without going into debt.

Smallholder farmers and rural women are traditionally marginalized populations that have been left behind by large scale agriculture. myAgro’s approach operates with the understanding that smallholder farmers grow nearly 70% of the world’s food yet make up almost 80% of the world’s poorest populations, with 650 million living in Africa alone. Importantly, 60-70% of the smallholder farmers myAgro supports are women. myAgro provides the financial tools, inputs and training necessary to boost harvests, raise income and elevate opportunities for these hard to reach populations out of poverty.

How Came Up with the Idea & Who Was Involved: When I worked for One Acre Fund between 2008 and 2011, I created a flexible cash repayment system for farmers who were buying seeds and fertilizer through the program. One of the things I found early on was that farmers would often ask for the option to pre-pay their loans for a few months—or even a year—before getting a loan. I realized that these farmers were actually describing their need for a savings model. How & When Project Initially Began: In 2011, I moved to Mali to test a mobile layaway program and, based on the success of the model, I launched myAgro to help smallholder farmers pay in advance for high-quality seeds, fertilizer, and training. At the heart of our business model is that we see myAgro farmers as customers in the marketplace rather than simply "beneficiaries". We know that these farmers are more than able to self-direct their money towards the services and tools they need to live a better-quality life and it’s our role to help them do it.

I have lived in Sub Saharan Africa, working with farmers since 2008. After college, while working for a poverty think tank in my parent’s home of Sri Lanka, I witnessed the tsunami that destroyed the country’s coastline. While I immediately volunteered where I could, the sheer enormity of devastation overwhelmed first responders and much of the country was too paralyzed for the first few days to help. Fisherfolk and coastal farmers who survived literally sat on collapsed homes, guarding their tin roofs from confiscation because they didn’t believe the government’s promises to rebuild homes further inland. The image of coastal farmers sitting on their collapsed tin roofs stays with me today as I and the myAgro team fight for farmers to have the dignity of choice. The dignity of choice that we deeply believe in is linked to having the economic freedom that comes from not living under extreme poverty.

Before starting myAgro, I worked for and learned from two of the fastest growing and innovative social enterprises that empower people living in poverty: Kiva and One Acre Fund. My tenure at Kiva proved an exciting immersion into the rapid expansion of microfinance. Working closely with the co-founders, I learned how to be open to taking smart risks to test new ideas and design platforms to scale. At One Acre Fund, I created a flexible cash repayment system, spending most of my days with farmers observing and understanding who repaid their loans, who struggled to repay, and who had the will to repay, but paid late. As I deepened relationships with farmers and field staff, I repeatedly heard farmers ask for the option to pre-pay their loan a few months, or even a year, before getting a loan. While they used the language of credit, these farmers were actually describing their need for a layaway model. Motivated by this stunning insight, I began asking the question – are there alternatives to credit for smallholder farmers?

To test the model, I moved to Mali in 2011, the world’s 14th poorest country. One Acre Fund provided start-up capital – the first and only time it has ever supported a peer organization. Two months before myAgro’s first planting season, a military coup occurred leaving the country without a government for months. Foreign governments, which finance the bulk of Mali’s budget, stopped their funding. While USAID, Peace Corps and nearly every other NGO or international enterprise left the country, myAgro stayed, and even grew during the counter-coup that ensued the following year. This commitment to impact and loyalty to farmers remains at the core of myAgro’s values. Today, we continue to build out a world-class organization that excels in the face of great adversity, proving the resilience of the myAgro model. Our perseverance is matched only by the perseverance of myAgro’s farmers who inspire us daily to fight against the injustice of poverty.

One of the biggest challenges that I have faced occurred during our first planting season.  Two months before planting, Mali underwent a military coup, the government shut down, and foreign donors pulled out of the country.  Though I never doubted staying, I was concerned that, as this was our first year in-country, farmers would not trust us with their money and would hesitate to make payments while they saw other organizations exiting.  When I soon saw that farmers were in fact continuing to pay, the challenge quickly became scaling at a fast enough pace.  We needed funders to support our operations and fertilizer costs sooner than originally planned, and we had to prove to them that as a new organization we had the capacity to effectively implement our program despite working under a volatile government. We decided to diversify our program risk by expanding to Senegal, and demonstrated that we can operate in a difficult environment.  I am also someone who loves to focus on the work and am less focused on talking about it, but I learned early on that we need to communicate even more during challenging times to balance out the news reports of doom and gloom.