myAgro vendor Fatou submits a farmer’s payment using her smartphone
Thanks to the wealth of data collected through a vast network of myAgro field agents and vendors equipped with smartphones, myAgro is quickly becoming a leader in understanding the payment behaviors of small-scale farmers in West Africa. The continuous analysis of behavioral information collected throughout the year allows myAgro to use human-centered design to create evidence-based products and services that put farmers at the center of all operations.
In August 2017, myAgro field staff in Mali detected an unforeseen challenge hidden in an eight-foot tall maize stalk in a town 60 kilometers from capital city Bamako: the Fall Army Worm (FAW). Known as one of the most damaging crop pests on the African continent, FAW can potentially devastate 70-100% of a maize field if caught too late.
As soon as myAgro’s field team discovered the pest, they quickly devised and implemented a plan to respond. In just ten days, myAgro designed a mobile phone app to capture information and images used to detect the prevalence of FAWs, trained field agents to identify and explain the potential devastating impact of FAWs on farmers, and deployed these trained agents to all myAgro districts to collect a total of 3,500 farm surveys. Results were then spatially mapped using open source GIS software, resulting in a powerful data visualization used to inform our next steps.
“Thanks to the data collected by our Monitoring & Evaluation team, we knew which farmers planned to harvest late and needed to be advised to harvest early,” explains Dido Ambali, myAgro’s Senior Agriculture Associate. “The decision to tell farmers to harvest early meant preventing further crop loss due to the FAW. Another measure we took in Mali was to add insecticide to the farmer’s packages.”
The FAW incident is just one of many examples illustrating how myAgro uses data to make informed decisions that impact farmers.
In addition to our quick response to field conditions that affect crop yield, myAgro collects extensive data through its SMS platform that helps farmers reach their savings goal. For farmers who are not on track to meet their goal, myAgro uses incentives such as bonus savings cards and pre-delivery possibilities to encourage farmers to make their layaway payments early. When farmers meet and exceed their savings goals, they enjoy a larger return on investment through increased crop yield, which encourages them to reinvest in their next harvest and save even more towards future returns.
In one example of our strategic use of data, myAgro noticed that male farmers tend to make large but less frequent payments than women, who tend to make small payments more often and in the evenings. In response, we can focus our efforts to those who need the most assistance at key times – shifting our field agent’s availability to spending evenings in zones with more women and checking in on male large-scale farmers less often.
As a data-driven organization, myAgro has exciting plans for the future. To increase climate resilience in the communities we serve, myAgro plans to monitor changes in weather and eventually incorporate weather forecasting data into our products and services. Climate change will impact many aspects of myAgro’s program, such as when we deliver seed packages to different regions and how we advise farmers to time their planting related to weather patterns, with our goal, as always, to support farmers to have the best harvests possible.
“It’s important to invest in good data infrastructure because it makes our operations more cost-effective while increasing impact for our farmers. This will help myAgro scale; reaching our north star of working with one million farmers by 2025 to increase their income by $1.50 per farmer per day to move out of poverty,” says Jaclene Roshan, myAgro’s Senior Director of Business Intelligence.
