My first week at the IFA Innovation Readiness Training was an amazing experience. You may not have heard about IFA so I'll tell you just a little bit about it. IFA is a program that inspires and trains aspiring African entrepreneurs through its rigorous Innovation Readiness Training. During this training fellows will learn the skills they need to succeed in a startup environment. Simply put, IFA is creating the next generation of Nigerian innovators. To learn more about IFA, click on this link.
In an effort to foster creativity, collaboration and critical thinking, the IFA team organized a Hackathon. A hackathon is a design sprint-like event in which domain experts, and others collaborate intensively on a project to solve a particular problem. The purpose of the hackathon is to give fellows insight into the longer process of designing, creating and building within an existing organization, or as an entrepreneur.
The hackathon process usually starts with a pitch, so we were prompted to identify problems and briefly describe them in a one-minute pitch. These problems emanate from different issue areas like financial inclusion, social impact, digital education, quality healthcare and climate change. Being the "Agrogirl" that I am, the pitch regarding financial inclusion for Nigerian farmers enticed me.
MEET THE TEAM
After voting I got to meet my 4 other amazing teammates Moby, Isiaka, Sope, and Segun. We now had 5 minutes to come up with a problem statement. Finally we chose the problem statement below.
Improving productivity in Agriculture by making finance available to farmers.
We were then encouraged to carry out a practice which is usually missed during Product Development Process- Primary Market Research(PMR). I will be taking you through my team's PMR and what new insights we gained from this significant process. But first though, what is PMR?
WHAT IS PMR?
Primary Market Research is a research that involves directly interacting with potential customers in order to understand them in all dimensions, figuratively "wearing their shoes for a mile or two". In our case, potential customers are prospective and practicing smallholder farmers. To kickstart the PMR process you need to make a plan.
MAKE A PLAN
To avoid wasting the time of our potential customers, we created a plan for conducting our PMR, this included PMR goals, interviewee criteria among others. The goals for our PMR were to identify how farmers got information regarding financial support for their farming businesses and the constraints they faced. Our target group were smallholder farmers and prospective farmers and we limited our interviewees to such ones. We took a note of 10 potential customers and wrote down their contact numbers. Afterwards we scheduled interviews with each of them.
Before reaching out to our interviewees we did some secondary research and discovered that approximately 90% of smallholder farmers have been able to access loans from banks. This made us even more curious and we wrote down a few questions to ask our potential customers.
PMR QUESTIONS
Some of the questions we asked are:
1. What type of farming you are involved in?
2. How did you source startup funds?
3. How do you get information regarding funding?
4. Which financial facilities are you aware of and which ones have you applied for?
5. Are you a member of any cooperative? What benefits do you enjoy?
5. What constraints have prevented you from getting access to funding?
INSIGHTS FROM PMR
After conducting the interviews, my team could more succinctly define the problems our users face. Read through the following profiles of our customers to gain a strong insight on what they need.
MS AKPAN
MR ADEKOYA
WHAT HAS CHANGED?
This new knowledge changed the way we thought about the problem, it became more evident that what the farmers need is access to funding and finance information. Based on the new insights we gained through our empathy work we went on to reframe our problem statement to be
Improving Agricultural productivity in Nigeria by providing rural and urban farmers access to credit information.
Thanks to an effective PMR my team and I are in a better position to explore solutions to the problem.