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i'm umi howard director of the Lippmann family prize at the Wharton School and
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today I'm here with Liz L Van Riper the vice president for development at my
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agro welcome hi Amy thanks for having me so Liz L the idea for my aggro came from the vision
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that there was an opportunity to reimagine the way that small holder farmers in Africa were repaying their
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loans can you tell us a little bit about the start of my era grow and what inspired him sure so my anger was
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actually founded by Anushka at nayaki and she was an early employee of Kiva where she was learning all about
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microfinance and realized pretty quickly that if she wanted to make a dent in poverty she would have to work with
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smallholder farmers moved very quickly to Kenya and Rwanda working with one acre fund and while she was there she
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was figuring out how to help farmers repay their loans at higher repayment rates and it was during this time
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working on loans working on expanding micro credits when she experienced farmers approaching her trying to prepay
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their loans early and this was surprising because you know they didn't need to but yet they want to prepay as
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when they had the cash she even had some farmers pay the next year's loan in full
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before even and before even getting the loan and the reason this was so interesting was because the notion is
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that farmers are too poor to say they don't actually have money to save so even though these farmers were
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practicing the they were speaking the language of credit they were actually practicing the behavior of savings and
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Anushka was starting to see that maybe credit isn't going to be what's going to
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scale and actually include enable farmers to have some access to finance and you may know that right now the
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annual need for farmers the annual financing need for farmers all the smallholder farmers in the world
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if they could have the right amount of fan financing to invest in their fields it would be about two hundred billion
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dollars a year and only a quarter of that is being met currently so credit is pretty limited in its reach when it when
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it comes to small holder farmers so anishka realized that there really was an opportunity to you know look at
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the ability for farmers to save their own money and sort of self finance the inputs the seed the fertilizer the tools
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and the training they need to get out of poverty so that's how she started working on micro loans and expanding
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access to microloans and realizing that there's other ways to complement the the
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microcredit industry and to look at savings as that vehicle to fill the gap so Lee Zell can you actually say a
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little bit more about where exactly you operate and how that affects the model of my Agri yeah so right now we are
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working in Senegal which is where our headquarters are located and also in Mali and in that part of Africa in that
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part of West Africa if farmers have a lot of land but they don't have access
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to the financing they need to invest in those lands and to buy the seed and fertilizer to do it properly
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and so there's in this enormous need you've got a lot of uncultivated land
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and three-quarters of the population in Mali for example are farmers and you've
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got a lot of young people there who could be potentially the next wave of future farmers for West Africa so for
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initio is a natural a natural place to test out this idea of can farmers save their own funds to invest their way out
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of poverty in addition there's also a lot of familiarity with scratchcards you
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know the ability of a farmer to use a scratch card model you know farmers they they purchase mobile phone cards almost
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weekly regularly scratch off the code and they punching that code and they've
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just topped off their mobile phone with more minutes and that's a regular practice in West Africa so Anushka
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thought let's this scratch card model could work really well and it wouldn't
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require a ton of behavior change for farmers so she wanted to test this model out in Mali it worked out well
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politically there was a coup that just followed by a counter-coup so she thought maybe we can also expand into a
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more stable region expanded the model into Senegal and this year we're working
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with 25,000 farmers in each country the program is growing and the Senegal is proving a wonderful place for us to
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have our headquarters and our home base and continue testing new ways to increase farmers a productivity and
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farmer income so organizations like my agro that are trying to change people's
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lives really are dealing with complex adaptive problems right the environment changes the ways that we try to do the
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work change can you point to one thing that's changed in my agro over the past
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five years in terms the way you approach the work what's changed yeah so we're
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starting to see now more and more that climate change is a problem for our farmers it presents a major challenge
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when our farmers are now contending with shifting rains and shortening rain-shortened rain seasons more so now
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than ever and so when farmers are having to contend with shorter rainy seasons or a
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rainy season that starts later we have to figure out how we can help support them one of the ways we're doing that
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for example is we've we've rolled out a new product a new crop package or
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sorghum sorghum is a seed that is drought resistant and it's resilient you can actually plant it and even if the
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rains don't come at the time that the farmer is expecting the rains to come the see the seed will still stay intact
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and germinate when the rains eventually do make it so that's a type of seed that
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again a farmer who's contending with unpredictable rains and having very little labor to plant during that short
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planting season sorghum is a great package for us to sell and it's also nutrient dense so we actually sold quite
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a few packages of sorghum to women farmers this year and we plan to expand that program again as a way to help
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farmers build their resilience against the the shifting climate so that would be a recent more more recent phenomenon
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that we're having to deal with so you've worked at several cutting edge social
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impact organizations including Kiva kickstart can you say a little bit about you were attracted to my aggro oh yeah
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I'd love to so I've been fortunate because much of my career has been in
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service and working within for small holder farmers and entrepreneurial minded entrepreneurs really and I've
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always loved working at it in a model that helps a farmer or helps an entrepreneur lift themselves out of
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poverty and microfinance and microcredit has largely spurred that you know once an opportune entrepreneur has access
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even so as little as $400 you know that can go such a long way in a place like Mali and Senegal so I've always been
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inspired by models that extend and expand access to capital and my iGrow is going to do that and I think in my heart
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in a much bigger way than we're seeing right now with microfinance my Agra's
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model is tapping into people's own finances it's their own ability to lift
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themselves out of poverty using what they're already familiar with you know their mobile phones and scratch cards
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and to me that's that's inspiring and it's exciting because I think it has
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potential to scale across rural Africa in a way that microfinance and microcredit hasn't yet I see the two as
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complementary you know like I mentioned earlier there's an enormous financing
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gap for small holder farmers around the world we need as many solutions as we can and I think of savings and mobile
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layaway as a complement to microcredit so that really points us towards the future what do you see for my a grow in
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the next five to ten years well right now we're at an inflection point we're
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working with 50,000 farmers this year by 2020 we're expecting to be working with
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200,000 farmers in that year alone we're expanding to Tanzania to trial our model
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with mobile money mobile money's prevalent there and we think that if we can find a way for farmers who use
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mobile money to save little by little that that could scale quickly we also see ourselves on track toward our North
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Star which is working with a million farmers in 2025 and by that time we want to
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double their farm income so take farmers who are living on a dollar 50 a day and
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get them to about $3 a day so that's where I really see my eye grow in the next seven years seventy five to seven
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years how are we going to get there we're really excited because we're starting to tap into an exciting new
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distribution channel and that's savings groups so today there's about 16 million
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farmers who are already organized into formal and informal savings groups and so they're already in these savings
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groups practicing savings patterns savings behaviors but they're not using their savings to invest in their fields
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so the handful of large NGOs that manage these savings groups there are now working and partnering with my Angra
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asking us to come in and help those savings group members who by the way are mostly women help those women savings
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group members save and divert their savings on what's actually going to increase their income which is
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high-quality seed fertilizer and training in their fields right now a lot of the savings group members they're not
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investing that savings into their fields and that's where my grow comes in it's
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actually a really great marriage between the savings groups on my grows model we
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drive the impact and they can fete they can already use their regular savings behaviors to help lift themselves out of
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poverty so that's really where I see us heading is expanding through these new
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distribution channels of savings groups so at the Lippman prize we are very focused on the potential for the
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transfer of practice between organizations an organization like my agro has a very adaptable framework in
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terms of the way that you work with government agencies nonprofits these savings groups when you think about the
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transfer or the spread of the my Agra model what do you need in order to make that happen we've got to build in our
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platform first internally we've got a mobile layaway platform that we've built
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on Salesforce and it's been something that has worked well for us in the last
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seven years that since we since we've been founded we're now at that point
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where we're serving 50,000 customers this year and if we're doubling to a
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hundred thousand two hundred thousand we've got to get a much much more robust
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platform and on the tech side that's going to enable us to partner more easily with these large savings group
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networks so first and foremost is getting our mobile platform on another level it's also building out our middle
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management so right now when you look at the my girl model we've got a whole army
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of field agents these these men and women field agents who are working on the ground with our farmers and with the
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village mom-and-pop shops to try to enroll more farmers into my a grow at the rate at which we're scaling we need
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a pipeline of the best from that group we're going to serve as the managers in
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the middle layer so that's going to take a lot of training a lot of grooming and
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identifying who our most promising leaders are we've got a new training academy that we've implemented that is
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designed to build a pipeline of future middle managers so that's something that
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we're going to have to prepare for is making sure we not only have the right
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tech and mobile platform systems in place but that we have the right people who are ready to go and trained and
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ready to grow with us so you're describing a iterative process for developing the organization and refining
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the model can you share one challenge that you've had over the last few years in getting
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to the place where you are now and maybe a little bit about how you've worked to overcome it yeah literacy
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rates are quite low where we work in Mali especially and we have been challenged in our field agents whom I
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mentioned those are our frontline staffers who are going out there working with the farmers and if they aren't
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literate or the vendors are working with arts illiterate then it becomes a challenge to implement our training our
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training materials much of which includes written language so we've had to adapt by creating
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low literacy tools lots of photos lots of icons we have a smartphone that all of our field agents and our mom the
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village vendors are armed with weak whip them with a smartphone and they use this
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to actually work with farmers to get them to enroll with my agro and this year in Mali we've rolled out a low
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literacy app so if I'm talking to you as a farmer instead of showing you words or
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trying to read words to you I have very easy-to-use pictures and both of us if we have low literacy can go through the
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process quickly and easily so that's an area that we're innovating around and
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trying to build and work around is how do we achieve success and impact in a setting where the literacy rates are so
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low my a girl also is doing work that really emphasizes women's leadership and
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so can you talk a little bit about the opportunity that you see there and the ways in what you're doing it so we're
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one of the one of the facets about Maya grow that I love so much is we're one of
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the fastest growing employers of rural youth in West Africa there are not as many organizations out there that are
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growing as quickly as we are and rely on a field staff that need to be from the villages where we serve so that means
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we're recruiting at a rate now that's it's pretty exciting we're constantly
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looking for qualified field agents to come and work for us and with us they undergo a lot of professional
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development as I mentioned we now have a training academy so they're getting a
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lot of great skills they become pretty savvy whether using a smartphone and using apps many of whom have never used
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that before right now our field staff our field agent staff is about less than ten less
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than seven percent women and we want to kick that up we would love to see a ratio of 30 percent of our staff at
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least being women and in order to get there we've got a groom again find the
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best one and figure out how to groom those potential leaders so this year we launched something called leadership day
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FM and it's the women's leadership program and we're looking for the best and the brightest women who
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have promised and we're putting them through training that they've never in
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their lives received like how did how to build confidence how to run a meeting how to delegate tasks how to how to use
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soft skills to win people over how do you talk to customers in a way that makes the customers feel good and you're
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sort of building up that customer service rapport these are all skills that we're teaching in this leadership
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de femme and the the women they have said repeatedly they've never gotten this kind of training before they've
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never gotten professional development before and we don't see this as just for
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my aggro we want to support them for their future careers you know this is training that's going to benefit them
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for their next job and that's what we want we want these women to become future leaders from the areas that
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they're that they're serving in rural Mali rural Senegal so the Berryman reliving a family prize
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combines both a cash reward and a partnership for the winning organization which is my a grow this year
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congratulations thank you you are going to receive 250,000 and unrestricted funding can you say a little bit about
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the way that you imagine using that those resources sure yeah we're constantly building out
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our systems and our leadership bench so I mentioned earlier about the the mobile
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layaway platform we want to continue to build that out so we can ensure that when we are working and serving with a
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million customers in 2025 that we have the right infrastructure to support that because that's a lot of SMS Texas coming
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in in the form of payments so we want to build out that platform again talking about the the middle management layer we
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want to continue building at our training and education program for our field staff to make sure that we are as
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strong and prepared to serve this the scale in this inflection point that we're currently facing
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we also are experimenting and in trying to roll out more work with a planter it's a my anchor precision planter and
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what we have found is this planter let me back up we actually the biggest constraint right now the farmers face
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and why they don't buy bigger my agro packages is a lack of labor they have said repeatedly if they had a way to
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plant the bigger packages in time for the rains they would buy bigger packages and what we've come up with is a planter
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that enables them to actually save up to ten planting days what and what that means is if I want to buy a fifty dollar
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package of seed and fertilizer from my agro but I know I there's no way I'm
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gonna plant that in time for the rains but if I had this plant or at least access to this planter I would buy that
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bigger package and that bigger package at the end of the season is going to translate into more food and more money
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for me so we're we're experimenting with ways to expand access to this planter we
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don't want we're not envisioning that every migrant farmer buys this planter
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but we want to figure out ways for them to have access to it so we're investing
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our resources and our donor funding and answering some some fun questions like what if we were to have a lease program
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where we least the the planter to a village and they rent it out for income sort of like a library system where
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there's someone there who's leasing it and they check it out to farmers and
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that person is generating income we get we're experimenting and thinking through
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some fund funding mechanisms to get many more farmers using this planter so that's part of what we'll be using the
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funding on as well as getting farmers to increase their impact and that translates into you know activities
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around the planter and building out our staff and building out our platform in previous conversation you mentioned that
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there's the some design work to do with the planter it makes me think of the
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school of engineering here at Penn being in Lipman prize-winner it makes my a grow part of not only the apprise
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community but also the Wharton and broader Penn community can you speak a little bit to your hopes for the
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partnership there and how we might be able to to support the work of my Agra my hope
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and vision for this partnership is a multi-faceted partnership don't get me wrong the 250,000 dollars in
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unrestricted cash grant is hugely meaningful to us the other parts of the award are also exciting we would love to
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take advantage of leadership development everyone from you know the the whole leadership team to our promising leaders
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in the field they could benefit tremendously if they had access to some of the education program and educational
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programming that you offer so very excited to take advantage of that both from members of the staff who are like I
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said at the leadership level and also in the field we are always looking for help
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with our design that that precision planter that we have we're trying to decrease the the manufacture costs how
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can we lower the cost of that so that it becomes more accessible and affordable and we're constantly looking for for new
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ideas and new thought partners so when you mention the design school that's that's definitely something we'd want to
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explore and I I think of it also is knowledge sharing you know as you continue to grow the Lippman family of
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honorees how can we help what can we do that what how can we share what we're
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doing and learning and and making mistakes on you know how do we share that with your larger honoree group and
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your honoree family because we're part of that now as well so a lot of knowledge sharing and that would be a
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big benefit to us and we'd be happy to do that fantastic well thank you for joining us today and
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for sharing about my a grow it's been a pleasure to talk to you Thank You Umi
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and thanks for the Lippman family and the Lippmann Prize Committee for this honor we're so happy thank you for more
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insight from knowledge at Wharton please visit Wharton UPenn CDU [Music]