$1.25 million Skoll Foundation Award goes to 2016 and 2017 grantee myAgro
myAgro Enrollment
The Skoll Foundation’s stated mission is “investing in change agents whose innovations disrupt the status quo and accelerating their progress toward impact at scale.” It was founded in 1999 by Jeff Skoll, MBA 1995, who was the first employee and president of ebay. For more on the Skoll Foundation, click here. myAgro’s “North Star” is to lift a million small-hold farmers in sub-Saharan Africa (currently Mali, Senegal and Tanzania) out of generational poverty and achieve earnings of $1.50 per person per day by 2025, aligning them with the Skoll Foundation’s mission.
Project Redwood provided “catalytic capital” to myAgro at a time when the organization was poised to move from its early stage to being able to scale rapidly to meet this ambitious goal. This is an example of the “sweet spot” Project Redwood aims for. Our timely involvement helped myAgro not only meet specific scaling goals, but also meet the criteria that made it eligible for the Skoll Award.
The Skoll Award benefits its awardees by helping them further scale their operation and impact: facilitating collaboration with the Foundation’s network of entrepreneurs and by accessing media and fundraising opportunities. The organization must actively participate and engagewith the Skoll community of social entrepreneurs and thought leaders.
The award was accepted for myAgro at the 2018 Skoll World Forum by Founder and CEO Anushka Ratnayake. To read about Anushka, please click here.
To view a wonderful quick video about myAgro and see Anushka’s acceptance speech, please click on the YouTube link below.
Unlike many Project Redwood grantees, My Agro came in “over the transom,” via a consultant who reached out to Ken Inadomi. Ken and Rich Jerdonek approached Gail Schulze to sponsor myAgro. When Gail and Donna Allen met with CEO Anushka Ratnayake early on, they were impressed with, in Gail’s words, “her drive, confidence, humility and practicality.” myAgro was first awarded a grant in 2016, and received another in 2017.
Seventy percent of Africans make their living from agriculture, yet most don’t grow enough to feed themselves year-round, let alone have enough cash saved at the time when they need it most: early in the year to buy inputs for the growing season.
Microfinance, government subsidies and agriculture extension efforts fail to reach 93% of smallholders. MyAgro’s innovation is to provide a mobile layaway microsavings model to help farmers save little by little for higher quality seeds, fertilizer, tools and training. MyAgro’s village entrepreneurs collect the payments, tracking them through a specially-designed mobile phone account that also helps them provide simple financial planning. The use of the mobile phone system, instead of paper tracking, helps the farmers trust that their payments are being accurately recorded.
In addition to facilitating the purchase, myAgro uses volume buying to offer better-quality inputs to the farmers. And perhaps more importantly, the program includes training in improved farming methods. Finally, myAgro village entrepreneurs, collect the money, distribute the seed and fertilizer and oversee the training. The higher aggregate demand for the seeds and fertilizer stimulates the input market, thus driving value to the whole smallholder agricultural system.
Project Redwood’s 2016 grant of $25,000 to myAgro facilitated bringing this mobile technology to 136 field agents, allowing them to reach 34,000, 4,000 beyond their target of 30,000.
Having met its 2017 targets, myAgro received another $25,000 for 2018, and has already accomplished two of this year’s targets:
- Hired and trained 7 field agents (beating the target of 6)
- Hired and trained 46 Village Entrepreneurs (beating the target of 36) who actually enroll and counsel the farmers
The third goal of increasing farmer income by $150-300 per year is in progress, with over 2,000 farmers enrolled in the program and making payments into their savings plan.
One of Project Redwood’s goals for the projects it sponsors is to benefit in non-financial ways from their association with Project Redwood partners, in part by creating synergies with other organizations. Gail Shulze, the PRW sponsor of myAgro, provided this kind of support by introducing myAgro to the McKinsey Capacity Assessment Tool, and by introducing Anushka Ratnayake to Judith Press, whose connections at the World Bank facilitated an association with the government of Mali. Ken Inadomi brought myAgro into contact with Echoing Green, another funder with a mission similar to Project Redwood’s.
MyAgro is thus poised to achieve scalability by becoming more efficient, enabling field agents and village entrepreneurs to impact more farmers per person, by building their organizational capacity, and by identifying further opportunities to drive the use of technology.
Project Redwood’s timely investment created synergies and demonstrated that their “innovation was ripe,” contributing to their winning the award from the Skoll Foundation.
Anushka Ratnayake, Founder and CEO of myAgro