MyAgro is a West African-based social venture that provides reliable access to agricultural inputs and training through an innovative layaway savings model. The organization has served over 100K farmers and has the goal of increasing the incomes of one million farmers by $1.50/day by 2025. The organization is in a rapid scaling phase and there are efforts across the organization to institutionalize and automate processes, while utilizing nearly 10 years of historical data from the organization.

During my time with myAgro, I worked on two projects. The first was directly with the CEO regarding organizational strategy. In order for the venture to break even, farmers need to layaway on average $50 with myAgro over the course of a season. Currently only about 10 percent of farmers hit this hurdle. The question that was presented to me was simply put: “How do we get farmers to save more?” I approached this problem by digging to large data sets of transaction and demographic data to understand the key behaviors of top performing myAgro customers. Once understood, these behaviors could be used to inform sales and crop enrollment strategy. I also engaged with stakeholders across multiple levels and geographies within the organization to better understand the parameters of the problem and related ongoing initiatives. Personally, I found this project was an effective balance of engaging, impactful, and utilizing my analytical skillset developed in my prior career and at CBS.

The second project involved consolidating internal standard operating procedures (SOPs) for the variance finance teams across four countries and a variety of staff members. The organization has a long-term goal of transitioning internal processes onto a workforce management platform (SAP, Salesforce, etc). Historically, there has been a lack of internal documentation and consistency across the three countries myAgro operates in, therefore, consolidation is the first step in this transition. A personal takeaway from this exercise was the importance of institutionalizing backend processes early on in an organization’s lifecycle. The longer one waits to create consistency across components of the organization, the more difficult it will be. I relate this to the idea of tech debt at software companies – issues, and the effort required to fix them, will only magnify with time.

Overall, I found my time with myAgro valuable and in line with my personal goals and the mission of the Tamer Center – utilizing the tools of the private sector to provide social and societal value. I learned more about the inner workings and challenges facing a highly functioning social venture, while working to advance the goals of the organization.