Serving 1 Million Farmers
September 1, 2022
By Daisy Leigh, Country Expansion Manager
In February 2022 myAgro launched the New Country Expansion department; which thus far is comprised of 3 people; Deepti Mathew, Fabienne Vuanda, and Daisy Leigh. This small team has a BIG objective: design a process which enables myAgro to prioritise, select, test, and validate new countries to expand into.
Why? Because in order to meet myAgro’s North Star of serving 1 million farmers by 2026 we need to go beyond scaling activities in existing countries; we need to expand into new markets!
So where are these new geographies? myAgro has chosen to prioritise ECOWAS countries, and in March 2022 the NCE department began conducting desk-based research into 6 countries : Burkina-Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Niger, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.
Our research evaluated 5 key metrics to ascertain the most promising markets for myAgro to expand into :
- Demand🌱(#Seasons, Agricultural land, current crop yield, fertiliser consumption etc)
- Demography🗺️(Total population, Female population, Rural population, % of population living below the national poverty line)
- Political Environment⚖️(Political stability, Cost of starting a business, Corruption Perceptions)
- Digital Infrastructure📲(mobile network coverage, % pop with a mobile phone, Mobile Money usage)
- Economy💲(GDP per capita, GDP per capita growth, Agriculture, forestry and fishing (as % of GDP), Average annual growth of Agriculture
As well as conducting this analysis myAgro worked with Atlas AI, an American geospatial data analysis company, to identify the most promising client bases within these countries for myAgro to work in. The below image shows how Atlas created maps layered with agricultural, population and even political data to help us visualise the data. By the end of April 2022 our desk based research was completed and the 3 most promising countries selected to move forward with ground truthing activities (field based research to verify the assumptions developed during the preliminary desk based).
The top 3 countries were :
- Nigeria 🥇
- Côte d’Ivoire 🥈
- Ghana 🥉
These initial scoping steps pave the way for myAgro to develop a tested methodology to be used each time myAgro seeks new markets to expand into. By defining an expansion methodology the NCE team will enable myAgro to mitigate the risks and investment required to start-up activities in new countries.
To keep up-to-date on the NCE department’s latest work, continue following the NCE blog.
