Farmcrowdy — helping first-time users trust farm sponsorship
Four years growing from founding designer to program and product leadership inside Nigeria’s first digital agriculture platform: platform design, brand systems, growth infrastructure, and a cross-functional unit that incubated Farmcrowdy Foods, Grainpoint, and HAPI Insurance.
Context
Farmcrowdy launched in 2016 as Nigeria’s first digital agriculture crowdfunding platform, connecting urban sponsors with smallholder farmers across livestock and crop value chains. I joined in April 2017 as the founding designer, when there was no product team and no design system. Over four years the role grew through four titles as the company expanded into a multi-brand ecosystem: Farmcrowdy, Farmcrowdy Foods, Farmcrowdy Aggregator, HAPI Insurance, Agricsquare, and FarmGate Africa.
Founding the product layer
The first task was a platform both sponsors and farmers could trust: that money was safe, farm cycles would be tracked, returns would be paid. I designed the original sponsor platform, including investment flows, farm tracking dashboards, disbursement states, and the trust signals that made an untested agricultural investment product feel credible to first-time sponsors. The app won Best AgriTech Solution at the 2018 AppsAfrica Innovation Awards.
Building brand and growth systems
As the platform scaled I built and owned Farmcrowdy’s brand and marketing infrastructure: visual system, content strategy, and campaign execution across web, social, press and events. Redesigning the mobile sponsorship flow — the moment a first-time user decides whether farm sponsorship is trustworthy enough to put money into — moved conversion from 18% to 60%, and tracked sponsorship revenue grew from $1.86M to $9.14M.
Agricsquare and community infrastructure
I led product and content direction for Agricsquare, Farmcrowdy’s content and community platform. It grew into a large online agricultural community, eventually staffed with dedicated full-time coordinator and content roles.
Program Development Unit
In 2020 the company formally created the Program Development Unit, responsible for product development, donor-funded programme identification, and new product incubation. I led this unit, working across product definition, partnership design, and programme structure for Farmcrowdy Foods, Grainpoint, and HAPI Insurance.
Impact
Sponsors expressed 95–100% quarterly intent to re-invest across all four 2019 quarters. (Source: Annual Report 2019.)
Platform scale around the work
These are Farmcrowdy’s platform figures, reported at the end of 2019. They describe the scale the product operated at, not the result of any one screen or release. Farmers, customers acquired and subscriptions are separate populations and are not additive.
Growth and community scale
As my role expanded, I built and led Farmcrowdy’s brand and growth systems across content, press, community, events and measurement. By the end of 2019, that operating system supported 1,000+ media mentions, 166,119 email subscribers, a 19.75% email open rate, 16,800 backlinks and more than 50 public events. I also led product and content direction for Agricsquare as it grew to 25,000+ members.
Farmcrowdy’s recognition during this period
- United Nations Global Disruptive Innovation Award, UNIDO ITPO Italy, 2019
- British Awards for African Development: Africa’s Innovative Business of the Year 2019
- London Stock Exchange: Companies to Inspire Africa 2019
- Nigeria Stock Exchange: Next Bulls Award 2019
- FT/IFC Transformational Business Awards 2019 finalist
