More than 2.5 billion of the world’s poor rely on agriculture for their livelihood. Helping these smallholder farmers gain access to better products and inputs has the potential to improve their lives permanently. When farmers grow more food and earn more income, they are better able to provide for their families, send their children to school and invest in improving their farms. Growing Prosperity: Developing Repeatable Models To Scale The Adoption of Agricultural Innovations, a new report by Acumen and Bain & Company produced with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, unveils how social enterprises can find new, effective ways to profitably serve these hard-to-reach customers at scale. Based on extensive research conducted in five countries across South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, including interviews with more than 300 smallholder farmers, Growing Prosperity proposes how these companies can give poor customers much-needed access to the right products and services at the right time to help pull them out of poverty.
In this short course, you’ll hear directly from the authors about the report’s highlights and the new frameworks they developed. You’ll also begin to explore ways you can apply these tools and insights to your own work to scale adoption of products and services at the base of the pyramid. This is the first in a series of short courses based on the report.