myAgro sold farm seed the way vendors sold phone credit

Smallholder farmers in Mali, like most of the rural poor, receive cash in small, irregular amounts — a good day at the market, a bit of day labor, an animal sold off — but seed and fertilizer are sold in one bulk purchase costing far more than any single windfall covers. Microfinance's standard answer is credit: a loan for inputs, repaid after harvest. Working with One Acre Fund in Kenya, Anushka Ratnayake found many farmers actively did not want this.

No microfinance institution, bank, or government program at the time offered a savings product built for that pattern. The financial-inclusion toolkit ran almost entirely on credit and formal savings accounts, both of which required a farmer to trust and navigate an institution from scratch — exactly the trust a lump-sum loan or a bank account, at this population's scale of poverty, rarely earned.

Sold seed as prepaid credit: farmers buy scratch cards from phone vendors, text codes to save, and get inputs when the balance is complete, using an existing habit.

Farmers already trusted buying phone credit in small increments from local vendors, so the purchase ritual needed no new learning.

Scratch cards let farmers save small, irregular cash without needing a bank account or loan, removing the trust barrier.

The balance locked toward seed and fertilizer, preventing diversion to other uses and avoiding interest penalties for slow saving.

The existing vendor network provided distribution without building new infrastructure, keeping adoption cost near zero.

When a population can't save for a big periodic payment, piggyback on an existing small-payment habit and distribution rail instead of inventing a new financial product.

myAgro's own reporting shows 50–100% increases in harvested yield and 50%+ increases in farmer income; a 2016 pilot co-funded by the Global Innovation Fund, testing the model with 2,000 members of existing Village Savings and Loan groups, found participating farmers roughly doubled their income from $34 to $72 per one-sixteenth of a hectare after saving an average of $10 toward inputs. Ratnayake won the 2018 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship for the model.