Every Tuesday morning, myAgro agent Yaya Boire rides his motorcycle to Falan, a village in Southern Mali. Falan is an expansive village, with several neighborhoods of homes spiraling out on either side of a wide, level dirt road that runs directly through the village center. There, the mosque, the school, and the village store provide a natural gathering place for farmers to chat on their way to their fields. Yaya’s first stop of the day was to visit that shop, painted bright green and sporting myAgro’s happy farmer logo, to collect the myAgro vendor’s card payments for the week and then sit for a moment learning the village’s news from the businessmen and officials talking and drinking tea outside.
Yaya spent the next four hours walking from house to house, following up with people who had come to last week’s village-wide meeting and expressed interest in joining myAgro. In the mornings during harvest season, most men in Falan are already out working on their fields, so Yaya focused on women who wanted inputs for their peanut crop. At that time of day, women were busy with morning chores: pounding grain into flour, kneading ground shea nuts into shea butter, or cooking lunch. Walking up to a yard surrounded by a low wall, Yaya called out ‘hello’ and then briefly chatted about the program. Some women invited him to sit down to discuss details of cost, timing, and benefits like agricultural trainings; others asked him to come back later. Yaya would do another round of visits in the evening to check back with them, and catch men at home. Over the course of the day, Yaya signed up nine new myAgro members.
Members value these personal visits that provide direct access to an expert on the program. During one visit, a woman said she wanted to enroll but had to wait to see if she could gather more money first. The total cost of the inputs package was too overwhelming. Yaya was able to take the time to break down the payment system for her, explaining how she only needed to sign up with her first dollar today. He asked her to think of her finances and if she’d have another dollar to spare next month, and so on, walking her through the calculations to see if she could afford the package she wanted. Having the payment plan clearly in front of her allowed the woman to realize she could indeed afford inputs for her field, which would result in a bigger harvest and higher income in the long run, all without putting her in debt as would happen if she waited to buy inputs at planting time when she’d have to take a loan.
The personal rapport Yaya developed allowed him to adapt his outreach to give the exact information this farmer needed. Yaya and the other agents share these experiences in weekly meetings where agents brainstorm ways to improve how they explain the program. Agents also use what they learn on door-to-door visits to give feedback on myAgro’s program design. Yaya’s success in talking with the woman in Falan, for example, allowed us to better understand how this farmer viewed long-term financial risk. We can adapt our outreach to better fit how farmers plan their budgets.
-Kyla Neilan
