myAgro Farms

myAgro's North Star is to help 1 million smallholder farmers to increase their income by $1.50 per day by 2025 to move above the poverty line and into the middle class.

Our specific targets are for our farmers to increase their harvests by 175% and their income by over 200% on average, to a point where their family is earning above $1,000 per year. This would put them into the middle income bracket in Mali.

myAgro employs a multi-pronged strategic approach to boost farmer income:

1. Savings Layaway: Farmers register with myAgro at harvest time and plan how much money they need for the following season 6-9 months away. We then provide them with financial access to a layaway account so they can make flexible payments towards their planting goals throughout the year, whenever it is convenient and whenever they have money they want to invest in their farms.

2. SMS Platform:
Farmers access their layaway account via their mobile phone so they can add money to their account or see their balance at any time of the day or night, from the most remote of villages. To add money to their account, farmers buy voucher cards in varying amounts that contain a scratch code they text in to myAgro. These cards are familiar technology as most people in West Africa use a similar system to add talk-time credit to their cellphones. Our farmers can purchase myAgro cards from their local village boutique as well as from neighborhood farmers we have selected to act as card vendors.

3. Access to Quality Seed and Fertilizer:
The majority of villages we work with are far from urban centers and therefore a recurring problem faced by farmers is that the seed and fertilizer that make it to local markets are not quality-controlled. myAgro delivers our farmer's packages directly to their villages rather than making them travel to regional centers, we buy quality fertilizer in bulk, and we check and treat all of our seeds before distribution.

4. Modern Agricultural Trainings:
At planting time myAgro delivers inputs to our farmers and assigns agricultural agents to each village we work with to train farmers on how to plant, weed, harvest and store their produce for longer. We maintain an extremely high specialist to farmer ratio so that each of our farmers gets expert technical advice and gains the biggest harvests possible from their investment in quality seeds and fertilizer.

5. Using Local Networks:
We use local representatives to enroll farmers and encourage them to use their savings layaway account: local boutique owners and farmer vendor assistants (roaming sales agent) who sell our scratch cards earn a 1.5% commission, and we also select a local female and male farmer representative to help mobilize others in their village.

6. Improved Market Access:
myAgro negotiates contracts with medium and large scale buyers in the capital to help farmers earn a higher-than market price for their harvests.

myAgro benefits from a number of capabilities that give us an advantage:

There is a strong savings culture in both Mali and Senegal, but currently very few people have access to formal savings services (only 4% in Mali and Senegal). Instead they are forced to save at home or with acquaintances, which can be risky. For example, approximately 12% of the population in Mali currently use community-based savings mechanisms, which represents a large potential market for our services.

Our program is designed to be easily-scalable as our donation cost-per-farmer goes down as we increase enrollment, and because our staffing is based on a village-team model that we can replicable as we expand to more villages.

We have strong, experienced leadership that guides our expansion: Anushka Ratnayake, our founder, was previously at Kiva where she created the Fellows Program. Most recently, she served as the Director of Core Programs and Innovation with One Acre Fund where she provided microcredit for small-scale farmers in East Africa. Our Board of Directors and official Advisors include representatives from Kiva, Grameen, One Acre Fund, Net Impact, Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, and Syngenta Foundation.

We have a highly-skilled local and expat team that ensures the quality of our services: we already employ over 250 full-time staff, the majority of whom are Malian and Senegalese citizens with university degrees and significant prior work experience. We also employ a PhD in agriculture to ensure the quality of our farming trainings, and local marketing staff to help us conduct outreach in rural villages.

Finally, we have gained early recognition for our work, including from the Gates Foundation, Echoing Green Foundation, Rainer Arnold Fellowship, and PopTech. As of 2016, myAgro has been cited by the World Bank's CGAP as a model for designing digital financial solutions for smallholder farmers.

Farmers participating in our program consistently have higher crop yields, which correspond to increased family income. In our pilot, farmers participating in our program earned an additional income of $234 and grew a harvest that was 80% bigger than comparable farms.

These results are extremely significant for the families who participate in our program as the average annual GDP per capita in Mali is $1,100 and in Senegal is $2,100. But we do not mean to stop there. Our long-term goal is to continue this positive trajectory and increase average farm income by over $1000 a year so that our farmers move entirely out of poverty and into middle-income. This projection is based on our calculations for how much additional income families can earn by planting more of their lands with high quality seed and fertilizer: as families earn the ability and decide to plant more of their hectares with myAgro, their income will rise even more.

We are also consistently expanding our impact each year in terms of the number of farmers who plant with us and the amount of money they save to invest in their fields. Our average farmers increased their savings by 27% in their second year with us, which means they could invest more in their fields and see even better results. In addition, our growth in enrollment has been staggering:

• In 2012, our pilot year, we worked with 340 farmers in Mali;
• In 2013, 1,600 farmers joined (370% increase), and we expanded from Mali to our second location, Senegal;
• In 2014, 5,100 farmers enrolled in Mali and Senegal (219% increase)

As of 2016, we reached a total of 17,051 farmers in both Mali and Senegal. In 2017, we expect to reach 30,000 farmers.

Each year between 70% and 80% of our farmers reach their entire savings goals, which is a high completion rate. In addition, even farmers who do not reach the entirety of their goal still plant with us but over a smaller area. (For example, if a farmer intends to save enough to cover 2 hectares but falls slightly short, they can still plant 1.75 hectares with myAgro seeds and fertilizer.)

We measure our impact through a rigorous M&E process after each harvest. Specifically, our agricultural agents measure the crops grown in a sample area (a box measuring 8m x 5m) from a random selection of myAgro fields and compare that weight to that of crops grown in a sample area of the same size from control fields. We also conduct consumption surveys and administer questionnaires on savings practices twice a year with a random selection of myAgro farmers to gain insights about their families' living standards. In both these evaluation processes we use newly enrolled farmers in villages where we have yet to start work as our control, as they have all the same characteristics as our current farmers but have yet to benefit from our services and are far enough away geographically that there are no spillover effects.