Sunday Nov 24, 2024
Sunday Nov 24, 2024
Wednesday, 30 September 2020 00:04 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
Founder and Executive Director of Senegal-based myAgro Anushka Ratnayake (right)
Sri Lankan-born Anushka Ratnayake has become one of the 13 recipients worldwide of the famous Schwab Foundation 2020 Social Entrepreneur Awardees.
It is given to outstanding leaders pioneering solutions for social and environment challenges ranging from refugee family reunification and human rights to water infrastructure and financial inclusion.
Anushka is the Founder and Executive Director of Senegal-based myAgro, a non-profit social enterprise. She has worked in rural Africa since mid-2008, helping to increase market access for small-scale farmers.
Prior to starting myAgro, she developed key components of One Acre Fund’s core operation model, created management-training programs.
She travelled across Africa and South Asia in search of innovations in the microfinance and agricultural sectors. Before joining One Acre Fund, Anushka was an early employee of Kiva.org and created the Kiva Fellows Program. Anushka received her BA in Literature from University of California, Santa Cruz and her agricultural training from smallholder farmers in Bungoma, Kenya. Anushka is considered a leader in digital solutions for smallholder farmers and is a featured speaker in many high profile events to lend her voice to financial inclusion, agriculture, gender inclusion and agriculture.
MyAgro is a social enterprise based in West Africa that enables smallholder farmers to gain financial independence and lift themselves out of poverty by investing directly in their farms. Through its unique mobile layaway model, myAgro offers an innovative savings model similar to prepaid mobile airtime models. Farmers buy a scratch card and send a secret code, which allows funds to be saved in the myAgro account.
It is able to deal with small amounts of money on a mobile technology platform that provides a comprehensive set of services: access to fertiliser, seed and other agricultural packages on mobile layaway, on-time delivery, as well as technical training. Last year, myAgro worked with 89,000 farmers in Senegal and Mali, 60% of whom were women, and next year aims to reach 120,000 smallholder farmers and more than 600,000 dependents.
MyAgro was named the winner of the 2018 Drucker Prize, the 2018 Lipman Family Prize, as well as the 2018 Skoll Award. It focuses on smallholder farmers, who number nearly 500 million in the world today, and are believed to grow over 80% of the world’s food. In African countries like Mali, Senegal and Tanzania, close to 75% of the population work in agriculture. Fewer than 11% have access to a formal bank account and 12% have access to mobile money.
The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship provides platforms at the country, regional and global levels to promote social entrepreneurship. The Foundation is a not-for-profit organization, founded in 1998. Its purpose is to “advance social entrepreneurship and to foster social entrepreneurs as an important catalyst for societal innovation and progress.”
The Foundation is under the legal supervision of the Swiss Federal Government. Its headquarters are in Geneva, Switzerland. Each year the Foundation selects 20-25 Social Entrepreneurs through a global “ Social Entrepreneur of the Year” competition.
