Work
Agritech / Product Leadership

Would you put your money into a farm you’ve never seen?

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.

Role
Founding Product Designer, later Head of Marketing & Product Development
Timeline
Apr 2017 — Oct 2020
Company
Farmcrowdy
A Farmcrowdy-branded farmer carrying firewood along a farm path between rows of cassava, under a stormy sky.
Farmcrowdy connected urban sponsors to smallholder farmers like this one across Nigeria's livestock and crop value chains.
01

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.

02

Starting with the public website

I started the broader redesign with the public website, before moving deeper into the account and sponsorship experience. The brief recorded at the time was a two-month web UX/UI refresh with the UI/UX team: make the site say what the company actually did, and give registered users somewhere to see their account, their transactions and updates from the farms they had funded.

The public page is where that starts. The old homepage asked a visitor to play a video to find out what Farmcrowdy was, and followed it with a row of illustrations carrying no words. The redesign put the proposition in the hero and used the band underneath to answer what a first-time sponsor asks before anything else: who else is doing this, and what protects the money. Separating the public proposition from the account states is what gave the deeper product work somewhere to sit.

The Farmcrowdy website before the redesign: a utility bar, a six-item navigation, a photographic band with a floating framed “What is FarmCrowdy?” video box, and a row of four unlabelled illustrated circles.

Scroll the frame sideways to read the full width.

Before. The page opened by asking the visitor to play a video to find out what the company did, and the row beneath it carried illustrations with no words attached.
The redesigned Farmcrowdy website: a shorter navigation, a full-bleed photographic hero carrying the headline “Empowering farmers. Together.”, carousel controls, and a dark band beneath it holding a “See how Farmcrowdy works” link beside insurance, review and sponsor-community markers.

Scroll the frame sideways to read the full width.

After. The proposition is stated in the hero instead of hidden in a video, and the band underneath answers the question a first-time sponsor actually asks — who else is doing this, and what protects me.
03

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.

Farmcrowdy first-run screen headed “Empower Rural Farmers”, describing farmers keeping a job, expanding operations and increasing revenue, above Sign Up and Log In actions.
01 · What sponsorship does for the farmer.
First-run screen headed “Strengthen Our Food Security”, describing participation in agriculture contributing to domestic food production.
02 · The food-security case.
First-run screen headed “Grow your money while helping rural farmers”, stating that sponsors earn a return while enabling rural farmers to access farming techniques and expertise, above Sign Up and Log In actions.
03 · The sponsor’s own return — placed third in the sequence, after the other two.
Farmcrowdy Farm Shop screen listing two farms open for sponsorship: a poultry farm in Kaduna at 15% harvest returns over 5 months, and a cassava farm in Edo at 25% harvest returns over 12 months, each with Details, Follow and Sponsor buttons.
The sponsorship decision a first-time user actually has to make: which farm, what return, over what timeframe, and how much to trust it.
Farmcrowdy farm details screen for a poultry farm in Kaduna, on the Farm Details tab: a farm photograph carrying a harvest-returns flag and an insurer badge, then the price per unit, contract period, harvest period, expected return and farm location, a unit-count stepper beside Sponsor Now and Follow Now actions, and a Farm Description section above the bottom navigation.
The decision surface reached from Farm Shop: price per unit, contract period, harvest period, expected return and location sit together above the unit count and the Sponsor Now action, with the farm description beneath.
Farmcrowdy Cart screen under a My Cart heading, listing two selected farm sponsorships — a poultry farm and a cassava farm — each with a price, quantity and remove control, a Total row, and a full-width Checkout action above the bottom navigation.
The commitment: selected sponsorships with their quantities and a running total, and one Checkout action.
Farmcrowdy farm page on the Harvest Returns tab, showing a Profit Simulation: a unit-count input with a Calculate action, an initial investment figure, and a table of period, net profit and return on harvest with payback and total rows, above Sponsor Now and Follow Farm actions.
A second tab on the farm page: enter a number of units and the projection is calculated per period, with payback and total. Figures shown are design placeholder values.
04

Tracking a farm through its cycle

Farms Followed screen listing maize, poultry and cassava farms, each with a month-by-month progress bar marked Month 1, Month 2 and Month 3 and a date the farm was followed.
Farms followed, each with a month-by-month progress bar and the date it was followed.
Farm Updates screen listing latest updates by crop, with a sort-by control offering maize, rice, cassava and soybeans, each entry summarising activity on a specific farm.
Updates with a sort control by crop, so the list can be narrowed to a farm the sponsor holds.
A single farm update dated 13.07.2017 headed “First Pre-Emergence Fertilizer Application has commenced at the Rice Farm in Bauchi”, with body text and previous/next navigation.
A single dated update, with previous/next navigation through that farm’s history.
Farms Followed screen annotated with a specification note explaining that a text window drops down when a user taps one of the arrows in the farms followed page, that it can contain text and image content tied to that farm update, and that it pushes the farm below down and collapses back on a second tap.
The same screen annotated as a build instruction: what the trigger is, what the panel may contain, and how the rows beneath it reflow.
Farmcrowdy dashboard showing a member card, a count of farms available for sponsorship with expected return after harvest, a count of farms sponsored with return received, and a grid of actions for farms sponsored, farm updates, browsing all farms, notifications, editing profile and farms followed.
The portfolio view: farms available against farms sponsored, expected against received, over a grid of member actions. Member and balances are design placeholders.
Profile screen headed “Account details to receive Return-After-Harvest”, with fields for account name, account number and bank name above an Update Account Details action.
Where the return is paid, collected in the profile rather than at checkout. Account details shown are design placeholders.
05

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.

Invite Friends screen offering Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp invitations plus a personal invite link to copy.
Referral inside the product: Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp invitations, plus a copyable invite link.
Farmcrowdy home feed showing a member card and a Farmcrowdy post with a farmer’s portrait, a quotation about optimism in farming, and like, share and view counts.
The in-product content feed — a post carrying image, quotation and like/share actions.
06

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.

07

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.

08

Impact

18% → 60%
Mobile sponsorship conversion
$1.86M → $9.14M
Tracked sponsorship revenue
45,000+
Customers acquired

Sponsors expressed 95–100% quarterly intent to re-invest across all four 2019 quarters. (Source: Annual Report 2019.)

09

Platform scale around the work

$10.59M
Sponsor funds
25,000+
Farmers
56,285
Subscriptions
16+
States

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.

10

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.

1,000+
Media mentions
166,119
Email subscribers
19.75%
Email open rate
16,800
Backlinks
11

Farmcrowdy’s recognition during this period

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