Partnering with the Rockefeller Foundation on the issue of post-harvest food spoilage, the IDEO.org team revisited Senegal to prototype solutions for smallholder farmers to gain better access to markets.

While working in Senegal on post-harvest loss as experienced by farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, we met Modou. He’s a young farmer who was also an employee at PAFA, an organization doing some really significant rural development in Senegal. He has a farm that he has optimized after receiving training from PAFA, but struggles to get his product to market. So we ran a quick prototype to see if greater linkage to markets would change Modou’s prospects. 

What We Did

We gave Modou 50,000 CFA (~$100) to rent a facility in his community and aggregate 1.5 tons of harvested products. We then challenged him to find a ‘market operator’ or trader who would buy these products from him.  

Within three days, Modou had found a facility and paid 35,000 CFA for it, aggregated one ton of products, and even taken a trip to a market 35 km away to show a trader samples. He told us that the trader exclaimed, “This is the first time a small farmer has come to me—I will certainly come and see your crops!” 

What you’ll need

The right person who is entrepreneurial, motivated to try something new, and who was not afraid to start something with a group in his community.  Modou fit the bill because he was already involved with an NGO and was an informal leader in his community. 

You’ll also need an idea that makes sense for farmers. Many of the crops farmers had grown spoiled because they couldn’t afford to transport their crops to the market. Now, for a minimal cost, farmers could aggregate their product and save on the cost of transportation while selling to a trader, allowing them to skip over the middleman. 

What we learned

Aggregation for cereals can work, and traders can benefit from picking up the products they need at a single location. What we are looking to learn as Modou continues this model is how he organizes his community members and what how they manage products of varying quality as more community members contribute aggregated products. 

Why It Counts

Sometimes a small nudge can create a world of difference. By giving Modou some seed capital and guidance around how to launch this prototype, we may have changed his community for the next year, if not longer. Farmers in their community had always assumed that they would bear the burden of transporting goods. Now they are empowered to have buyers come to them, simplifying their lives, improving their incomes, and reducing post-harvest loss.