Anushka Ratnayake has worked in rural Africa since mid-2008 and founded myAgro in 2011 to help smallholder farmers increase their food security. Through the use of digital financial tools such as layaway, the community can use mobile phones to purchase small amounts of seeds and fertilizer. myAgro currently supports more than 115,000 farmers in Mali, Senegal and Tanzania; they plan to reach one million farmers in the next five years.
An early employee of Kiva.org, Ratnayake previously worked at One Acre Fund. A 2018 Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, she is also a winner of the Skoll Award for social entrepreneurship.
We live in contentious times. Yet behind the dismaying headlines and social-media-fueled quarrels, people around the world — millions of them — are working unrelentingly to solve problems big and small, dreaming up new ways to expand the possible and build a better world. At “We the Future,” a day of talks at the TED […]
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