Rose Kiando, a farmer in Tanzania, stands with a sign demarcating her myAgro field
Since 2011, myAgro has worked directly with farmers across Sub-Saharan Africa to increase crop yields and incomes for tens-of-thousands of people. Ensuring life-changing agricultural and financial services are delivered year after year to the last mile requires careful research, design, and implementation, but convincing farmers to adopt myAgro into their lives presents its own host of challenges. Most of the farmers who grow with myAgro are introduced to the organization through our marketing efforts. Marketing teams in Mali, Senegal, and Tanzania spend their days answering a central question of connection: how do we connect the right message about myAgro’s value to the right farmer at the right time?
A particularly challenging group to reach with these messages is women farmers, who are historically overlooked and underserved by existing financial and agricultural services in the countries where we work. Below are just a few of the creative solutions employed by myAgro to bridge this gender gap.
Working Within Existing Family Structures
One challenge that myAgro faced in previous years was ensuring that female farmers could effectively make decisions about their farm planning while operating within traditional family structures that excluded women from such decisions. Many women were hesitant or unable to enroll for a myAgro package on time because they had not yet discussed the purchase with their husbands and families. In 2019, myAgro implemented a solution that provided potential female clients with flyers intended to be taken home and shared. The simple, cost-effective tools were successful in helping women farmers explain the value of enrolling with myAgro to family members and spouses, which turned the purchasing decision into a conversation with women at the center.
Curated Training Content
myAgro’s network of Village Entrepreneurs (VEs), who work with, represent, and sell myAgro packages at the village level are central to our marketing efforts. VEs are the face of mobile layaway—they are on their feet day-in and day-out meeting with, listening to, and mobilizing farmers to enroll and make payments toward packages.
Independent analysis has shown that improving the professional and entrepreneurial capacities of VEs is key to reaching more farmers. To ensure VEs have the tools they need for success, myAgro equips them with smartphones to record and share farmer information and data, as well as view training videos designed and produced by myAgro to improve performance, manage workflows, and decrease stress.
myAgro began exploring the idea of producing training videos when our field team noticed that female VEs in particular were often nervous about visiting farmers, and tended to be shyer than their male counterparts. In response, myAgro designed a video that discussed how to approach clients with confidence. It reminded VEs that although making house calls can be intimidating, myAgro farmers genuinely enjoy and appreciate their time, as they provide a space to socialize and chat as well as make payments. Like the other videos in the VE training series, VEs watch this video on their smartphones whenever they need a reminder.
Leveraging Mobile Technology
While the field team is hard at work, myAgro’s headquarters has made progress toward integrating phone-based communication into its marketing strategy. For the 2019 payment period, myAgro established call centers based out of our urban headquarters in Bamako, Mali and Thiès, Senegal. Equipped with mobile phones and a list of farmers to mobilize, call center team members called farmers to remind them of the importance of finishing payments for their packages, and the value of making payments early rather than waiting until the last minute. While the “innovation” of picking up the phone and calling farmers directly may sound simple, call centers are extremely effective at reaching farmers and encouraging them to make payments toward their packages. More than half myAgro’s clients in Senegal were reached by the call center this past year, which resulted in measurably higher payment and package completion rates.
Going forward, myAgro plans to integrate more technology—such as call centers and electronic education modules—into a wider range of programming, with the goal of delivering the highest quality service to the most farmers possible.
