70 percent of Africans make their living from agriculture, yet most smallholder farmers don’t grow enough food to eat year-round, leaving them in an endless cycle of poverty. Substandard and expensive inputs—including seeds and fertilizer—in a limited supply chain and distribution network only exacerbate the problem. Microfinance, government-subsidized fertilizer, and agriculture extension efforts fail to reach 93 percent of smallholders. Financial tools are not designed to help them save money, and public support largely falls short. myAgro has pioneered a new bank-less savings model that enables farmers to invest their own funds in high-quality seed, fertilizer, tools, and training to significantly increase their harvests and income. Using a prepaid scratch card model—similar to buying prepaid mobile minutes—farmers can pay in advance for seeds, fertilizer, tools, and training. Farmers buy myAgro cards from a local Village Entrepreneur (commission-based sales person), depositing their money into a layaway account by texting the scratch-off code. After a few months of laying away funds, myAgro delivers the fertilizer, seed, and training that the farmers have paid for in time for planting season. The program generates 50-100 percent increases in yields and an estimated 50 percent+ increase in farming income for smallholder farmers, 60 percent of which are women. Over the past six years myAgro has proven the power of its approach in Mali, Senegal, and Tanzania.
Microfinance, government-subsidized fertilizer, and agriculture extension efforts fail to reach 93 percent of smallholders, trapping them in a cycle of poverty.
myAgro pioneered a mobile layaway microsavings model so farmers can save for high-quality seeds, fertilizer, tools, and training to significantly increase their harvests and income.
After working with One Acre Fund and Kiva, Anushka Ratnayake moved to Mali to test the myAgro model.
By 2025, myAgro plans to reach 1 million farmers annually, enabling farmers to double their annual income and move their families out of poverty.
With access to a mobile savings tool, farmers can self-finance the inputs and training they need to provide for their families and to break the cycle of poverty.
myAgro’s North Star is to reach one million smallholder farmers by 2025 and help them increase their income by $1.50 per farmer per day to move out of poverty. With a proven model, myAgro is scaling by developing a homegrown salesforce called Village Entrepreneurs, and by partnering with other NGOs and governments.
CEO & Founder, myAgro
Anushka Ratnayake is the Founder and CEO of myAgro and has worked with and for farmers in rural sub-Saharan Africa since mid-2008. After college, while working at a poverty think tank in Sri Lanka, Anushka witnessed the tsunami that destroyed the country’s coastline. The image of coastal farmers and fishers sitting on their collapsed tin roofs remained seared in her memory. She became determined to work towards a world where rural people have the dignity of choice that comes from not living under extreme poverty. Anushka worked at two of the fastest growing and innovative social enterprises that empower people living in poverty: Kiva and One Acre Fund. At Kiva she became immersed in the rapid expansion of microfinance, learning how to take smart risks to test new ideas and design platforms to scale. For One Acre Fund, she created a flexible cash repayment system. She found that farmers asked for the option to pre-pay their loans for a few months—or even a year—before getting a loan, and she realized these farmers were actually describing their need for a savings model. In 2011, Anushka moved to Mali to test her mobile layaway savings model and remained there during a civil war from which nearly every other NGO fled. She launched myAgro to help smallholder farmers save money for high quality seeds, fertilizer, and training to lift themselves out of poverty. She is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, Rainer Arnhold Fellow, an Echoing Green Fellow, and a Draper Richard Kaplan Foundation Social Entrepreneurship Fellow.
