Websites, job descriptions, interviews, and personal testimonials are never enough to help you understand exactly what it will feel like, day-to-day, to live and breathe within an organization. The only way I’ve ever really known if I love a type of work is to give it a try. I have been, am currently, and may always be on a quest to find my calling in life, so the opportunity to immerse myself in a lot of different work environments and experiment with different types of roles and projects has dramatically accelerated my progress. As I settled into my work here at myAgro, I felt like I better understood myself and paid more attention to what makes a work experience positive, challenging, and overall meaningful. As I process these learnings, I will share more details about my life as an “Engineering Analyst” here at myAgro.
To start off, I first heard about myAgro about 7 months ago while I was in Myanmar working at Proximity. The founder of myAgro, Anushka, had come to Myanmar along with a mutual funder of Proximity and myAgro. After meeting her and hearing her story, I was impressed, very specifically by the way Anushka had identified a clear need and then worked tirelessly to start an organization to fill said need. The combination of being observant, listening to user needs, and then having the ambition and courage to do something about it is something I respect and deeply admire. Anushka worked in micro-credit but began to notice how some farmers disliked the burden of paying off a loan after they’ve used the money. Farmers are some of the most risk-averse people on the planet; they deeply understand that so much of their livelihood is out of their control, so relying on the success of a harvest to pay off debt can be scary. Farmers were asking if they could start paying off their loan, before they had even received it. They weren’t looking for micro-credit. They were looking for a layaway model to help them save, cover their expenses, and stay clear of debt. So that’s what Anushka created. myAgro is a social enterprise that offers farmers various packages of seed, fertilizer, trainings, and planting tools that farmers can enroll for and then pay for doni doni, meaning “little by little” in Bambara, through the use of scratch cards almost identical to cellphone top-up cards. Just before planting season begins, myAgro delivers, to the farmers who have completed their payments, exactly what the farmers have been saving for.
With the goal to increase smallholder farmers’ income, myAgro teaches farming techniques that are significantly more effective, albeit more labor intensive, and delivers products of high quality and reliability. But farmers often end up in a position where they are using our packages for a small percentage of the land that they cultivate. Initially, this is possibly due to risk aversion. myAgro packages are more expensive than what farmers buy on their own, so even though the returns are big, farmers need to see that it works for their own eyes. But even after farmers stand by the success of their myAgro fields, their ability to increase the size of their package is limited by their access to labor and the pressure they face to finish planting in a very small window of time. So a few years ago, some engineers worked with myAgro to develop an animal drawn planting tool, called a semoir, that drops a bit of fertilizer next to each seed. This is a huge time and labor saving device, given that the alternative is to place each seed in the soil by hand. Many of the larger scale farmers bought and love this tool, but the price of the semoir still puts it out of range for smaller scale farmers, especially women. So that’s what I’m here to do. Spend three months investigating ways to bring down the cost of the semoir, to help myAgro reach and boost the income of more farmers.
I started by doing as much research as I could, both into the costs of the current semoir as well as to find other examples, research projects, and products for inspiration. We decided that there are two paths of cost-cutting to explore, one being to consider a large redesign that eliminates the costliest components and the other being to look at smaller incremental trimmings that could come out of shipping packaging optimization, removing material or simplifying existing components, etc. The incremental changes investigation has happened a bit more in the background, with the majority of my attention on prototyping and testing a new design. In contrast to our more sophisticated, micro-dosing capable, reasonable accuracy semoir, there is a very different planting tool, called a drum seeder. The drum seeder is far simpler and cheaper, but is usually used for rice fields where precise seed placement isn’t as important as with corn and peanuts (our dominant local crops). My mission has been to see if a hybrid of our existing semoir with some simplifications modeled off of the drum seeder could produce a new semoir, cheaper but with quality that would be worth farmers investing in. Once again I’ve found myself in the negotiation between precision, price, and impact, and once again I’ve found that engineering with this mentality is something that suits me.
This may change as myAgro grows, but currently the tools development aspect of myAgro is small in comparison to the finance, logistics, and field operation of the organization as a whole, resulting in the tools team existing on the periphery. The team is run by Caroline with the help of two Malians, both who don’t have engineering backgrounds but have slowly learned how to run various tests and processes. This set up results in a working atmosphere for me that has been different than what I envisioned, for better and for worse. Without needing to grasp every moving part in the organization in order to dive into my project, it was easier to come in for a short period and feel like there is scope for me to accomplish something. However, the flipside of this is that my work ended up being much more independent than I’m used to. Rather than joining a team dedicated to redesigning the semoir, the project is set up more as a personal endeavor, where I supervise Nouhoum, one of the Malians on the team, and he helps me execute the steps as I lay them out. I share ideas and findings with Caroline, but more to seek advice and not as part of a collaborative team process. As someone who is drawn to team-driven work and less motivated by independent research, this working structure is challenging.
As a growth opportunity for myself, this experience is teaching me how to be a manager and oversee a project on my own. In order to make sure Nouhoum has work on his plate, it’s up to me to think a couple steps ahead and determine what needs to get done and in what order. Plus, it’s good practice to monitor the overall timeline of the project, focusing on the daily progress as well as how that fits in with reaching our overall goals. But on the other hand, I miss an environment where everyone throws ideas around together. I’ve been pushing Nouhoum to do more testing independently or oversee the fabrication of prototypes without me, but he isn’t ready to process results or think about creative design. If I draw a prototype and we talk about it, he can get it made. If we design a testing process together and then I lay out what parameters to test, he can complete the tests and bring back the results. And after I’ve processed the data, he enjoys talking through the results with me. As I’ve experienced in every country I’ve been in recently, the emphasis on rote learning in every aspect of the education system is severely limiting. myAgro is slowly working to bring in more Malians into higher positions in the organization, but the ways the local education system prevent someone from problem solving, seeing the big picture, or thinking for himself is a barrier. I know it takes a long time to build these capacities, but I still find it uncomfortable to just accept the reality and continue delegating tasks to Nouhoum without having him part of the collaboration or idea generation phases of the project. With such a short timeline, maybe the growth he’s had already through this project is meaningful and the system we have now is efficient. But on the other hand, I don’t want to accept such a division within the workplace and prefer to strive to include the local members in more than just rote execution tasks.
Whether it’s through learning that a certain element of myAgro motivates me or through learning that I would want something to be different in order to reach my greatest potential, I’m ever glad to have had this opportunity. I appreciate understanding more about the world of micro-finance, both credit and savings models, and I am fascinated by discussions around quantifying the impact our work is having, especially as many of my colleagues are dedicated to expansion and growth of the organization. The experiences and backgrounds of my colleagues are quite different than in some of my previous projects, so on a personal level I’m gaining just through hearing their stories and learning about their lives. And additionally, being in an unfamiliar part of the world, it’s fascinating to realize how different cultures, politics, and history of international involvement can affect how ideas succeed or fail regionally. Ultimately, there are endless things for me to learn and continue exploring, and although I’m quick to turn everything into a growth opportunity, I am also making progress towards figuring out what truly helps me thrive. At this point, I’ve experienced different ends of so many spectrums, from being hands on to being more of a manager, from doing design and user research to physical engineering, from team collaboration to independent work, and from large organization to small, and not that there is only one place on each spectrum for me, but I’m slowly piecing together what will make me excited to go to work every morning. And at the end of the day, that is perhaps the best measure of whether I’m on the right path.
To prepare for the delivery of all goods to farmers, I helped Caroline oversee the assembly of the semoirs. The first row shows the truck when it dropped off all the boxes of parts and the truck as we loaded it up with assembled semoirs and sent them out to the villages.
The second row shows the teams of laborers we trained to assemble.
The third row shows Nouhoum doing quality assurance and the accumulation of finished products!
The row with the taxis is from a trip I took into the field to watch delivery in action. But in typical fashion, taxis here are notoriously in poor condition, our taxi broke. But this was the most dramatic taxi breaking down I’ve witnessed. The entire back axle and several other key parts of machinery fell out of the car and onto the road. A puff of black smoke and a spring that flew out of the car made it feel straight out of a comic. All part of the adventure.
The last three rows are from a delivery site. Farmers get checked in and then present the details of their package to the team distributing goods. You can see bags of fertilizer and seed, lots of people gathered, and children playing nearby.
