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About the Organization

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. 

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Microfinance, government-subsidized fertilizer, and agriculture extension efforts fail to reach 93 percent of smallholders, trapping them in a cycle of poverty.

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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.

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After working with One Acre Fund and Kiva, Anushka Ratnayake moved to Mali to test the myAgro model.

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By 2025, myAgro plans to reach 1 million farmers annually, enabling farmers to double their annual income and move their families out of poverty.

Ambition for Change

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. 

Path to Scale

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. 

Skoll Awardee

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.

Impact & Accomplishments
  • myAgro grew from 45,000 farmers to nearly 62,000, farmers, a 37 percenrt increase from 2018, and expanded operations to a third country (Tanzania). Further, myAgro laid the foundation for future farmer growth in 2020 by expanding to 1,282 villages, a 43 percent increase over the previous year. In 2019, early adopters in these new villages joined myAgro and their results will help spark growth of the myAgro program as their harvest yields and incomes are shared among villagers in the new regions.  
  • In 2019, each farmer who worked with myAgro earned an additional $112 of income as a result of their improved harvests. This increase of $.30 per day for households who had been living on less than $2 per day results in food security and transformative changes to quality of life. 
  • myAgro is partnering with 3 large NGOs—Catholic Relief Services, Stromme Foundation and Aga Khan Foundation—that collectively manage over four million rural saving group members, to leverage their saving group networks as distribution channels. These organizations are funding field costs for myAgro to enter new markets. 
Affiliated
Erin Moore
Chief Development Officer, myAgro
Kira Elbert
Chief Development Officer, myAgro
Naomi Baer
Social Venture Practitioner in Residence, Center for Social Innovation, myAgro
Jane Choi
Chief Financial Officer, myAgro
Liezl Van Riper
Vice President, Development, myAgro
Evan Marwell
Board Chair, myAgro
Anushka Ratnayake
CEO & Founder, myAgro
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