October 1, 2018: Today the Drucker Institute announced that myAgro has been named winner of the 2018 Drucker Prize. The Drucker Prize will leverage myAgro to reach its North Star of helping one million smallholder farmers out of poverty by 2025.
The Drucker Institute celebrated myAgro’s innovation; a mobile layaway program, helping smallholder farmers to lift themselves out of poverty by paying for farm inputs in small increments and increasing their harvests.
“We couldn’t be more honored and thrilled to be selected for the 2018 Drucker Prize,” says Anushka Ratnayake, myAgro founder and CEO. “Winning this prize will help us continue our work to transform the landscape of smallholder farmer financing.”
The Drucker Prize is awarded each year to one organization that best exemplifies Peter Drucker’s definition of innovation: “change that creates a new dimension of performance.” The Drucker Prize judges recognized the impact myAgro has had on smallholder farmers and the way the mobile layaway program has transformed the landscape of smallholder farmer financing using existing systems familiar to the farmers.
“Before myAgro, it was hard to pay for fertilizer because I had to go to the shop and pay for it all at once, and I didn’t have the money,” says myAgro farmer Beykam, “but with myAgro, it’s very easy to pay because every Wednesday the vendor comes and we make payments little by little.”
myAgro is a non-profit social enterprise based in West Africa that has pioneered a mobile layaway savings model that enables farmers to invest their own funds in high-quality seed, fertilizer, tools and agricultural training to significantly increase their harvests and income. Using a prepaid scratch card model, farmers pay in advance for their farm inputs by buying a myAgro card from a local vendor and depositing their money into a layaway account by texting in the scratch-off code.
After a few months of buying the scratch cards, myAgro delivers the fertilizer, seed, and training they’ve paid for in time for the rainy season. The program is delivering 50-100% increases in yields and 50%+ increases in incomes for smallholder farmers. This year myAgro will work with 50,000 farmers and help move 500,000 people out of poverty.
“Among the greatest challenges in the social sector is scaling an innovation within an environment rife with social and logistical challenges,” said Zach First, executive director of the Drucker Institute. “But myAgro has married an innovative distribution system to its innovative program for a population so often overlooked: smallholder farmers in developing countries. By helping tens of thousands of these farmers be more productive, myAgro is improving the lives of hundreds of thousands of their family and community members. Now, instead of being forced to eat their seed corn, these farmers are harvesting greater health, education and prosperity.”
For more information about myAgro, click here.
For more information about the Drucker Prize, click here.
