PHOTO CAPTION: myAgro Agents from Mali’s Dialakoroba zone work together to create a budget and savings plan for a typical Malian farmer during a training on financial planning.
With enrollment wrapped up and the first planting season trainings still several weeks away, myAgro’s agents in the Dialakoroba region of Mali are taking a pause to reflect on their work. In these months agents continue to visit their villages, offering support and advice to farmers, encouraging farmers to save money towards inputs. Agents also use this time to look back on their outreach during the fast-paced enrollment season and to strategize for upcoming agricultural trainings, input delivery, and what they’ll do differently in the enrollment season next year. To facilitate this learning, the Dialakoroba agents—myAgro’s most experienced group working in our first region—are participating in a 7-week training program to review skills, build new ones, and above all, share their best practices amongst each other.
The agents’ curriculum covers everything from leading dynamic meetings to using active listening to better understand farmer needs. Agents are examining how to respond and relate to differences among farmers like gender or age. They’re also building technical skills by diving deeper into subjects like financial planning and some of agricultural science behind myAgro’s planting techniques. The coursework is participatory. That means that agent input guided the curriculum design, and every lesson is based around questions that draw out experiences and knowledge from the participants. As much as possible, the agents are the teachers. Agents share stories on their strategies for talking about tough subjects, and troubleshoot each other’s questions. Group exercises and role-playing put new information into practice, while friendly competitions—like a storytelling contest—push everyone to experiment with new techniques and share their best.
myAgro’s agents are Jacks and Jills of all trades. Not only must they understand some of the complexities of microdosing fertilizer and planning a budget around a farmer’s irregular income, but they must also be able to talk openly about these intimate subjects with our farmer-members. It takes skill for young agents to convince experienced farmers to try new agricultural methods. They need to know how and why the methods work to be able to respond to hard questions from a knowledgeable audience. And it takes skill to lead a productive, empowering conversation about money while respecting farmers’ privacy and the extreme hardship faced by many families in rural Mali.
At one point, supervisor Jean-Baptiste Dembele invited the agents to share how they approach conversations on myAgro’s saving system. He had a list of ideas to add in case the agents grew stuck, but instead they quickly covered his list and added some extras from their own experience: “Savings gives farmers autonomy,” said one agent. “It creates equality amongst farmers,” said another, because they don’t need to compete for limited amounts of subsidized fertilizer. And, importantly: “It drains away stress.”
As myAgro staff at all levels reflect on our member outreach this year, these poignant lessons on what aspects of savings most resonate with farmers form a basis for our whole organization’s learning. When we teach new agents strategies for enrollment next season, those trainings will be shaped what agents taught each other in agent trainings this year.
