Committing to the Perspective of Smallholder Female Farmers

Manda, standing tall in an aqua and fuchsia sari, blue netting around her hair and white rubber gloves on her hands, welcomes me and my colleagues to her home in a rural area outside Aurangabad, India.? With her is a collection of farmers, all female, all dressed in bright, perfectly pressed saris despite this being the season of monsoon rains.? The women bless us, gently circling a plate of oil and light beneath our faces, and softly pressing a red and turmeric bindi on our foreheads.? I’m reminded that business at its best is relational.

We’re here along with Acumen Fellow Nidhi Pant and Vaibhav Tidke, two of the seven co-founders of S4S Technologies, a company that provides climate-clean micro-food processing units to enable thousands of women to become businesswomen and contribute to improving food systems in their nation.? Our goal: to understand how this endeavor, which is so focused on supporting landless and smallholder women farmers, has grown into a company valued at $20 million and on path to scale—and to glean insight from the perspective of the farmers themselves.

One of S4S's co-founders, Nidhi Pant

Today, 120 households, 27 of whom are represented in this meeting, grow onions for delivery to this collection center at Manda’s house. It’s Manda’s job to negotiate a price based on quality as well as the additional margins the onions will bring in once dried and processed. She’s good at it; the farmers trust her. She is of the community.

This trust is integral to the mission of S4S. The company’s journey began when Vaibhav was studying at university and invented a solar dryer that vastly improved drying efficiencies in removing water and protecting vegetables like onions, ginger, garlic and tomatoes from rotting. He then met six fellow students, including Nidhi, who would go on to become co-founders of S4S, a dried-food ingredients company that sells solar dryers to women farmers who collect, dry and sometimes process crops. Those dried goods are then sold directly to buyers, thus bypassing expensive middlemen-- and significantly increasing the female farmers’ income levels.?

To date, the company has sold 2,600 dryers and impacted 800 micro-entrepreneurs that have supplied over 1 million people with nutrition-rich food. The company is on track to generate $20M this year and Nidhi and Vaibhav both believe they will impact 100 million farmers in the next decade.?

S4S is an extraordinary example of a new economy business model because of its care for people and planet both.? Every stakeholder group benefits from the S4S model, including customers who can rely on S4S products like onions or tomatoes to remain fresh for a year – in comparison to a typical fresh period of 7-8 days. And the dryers themselves don’t just significantly reduce food waste—they also eliminate coal or diesel-fueled dryers, which wreak havoc on the environment.

“We waste too much food unnecessarily, yet we also have a situation where 45% of Indian children are malnourished,” says Nidhi. “And India’s farmers are poor, yet they represent an enormous percentage of the population…We can solve these problems profitably and at scale. But we need to commit ourselves first to the perspective of women farmers and then figure out everything from there.”

Three S4S employees in Aurangabad pose the solar food dryers

This includes financing. Because low-income women farmers typically have no bank accounts, and thus no credit records, until recently, S4S has had to ensure their credit by partnering with local microfinance organizations that typically charge 25%.? But after working with more than 260 ?farmers, S4S has proven the creditworthiness of the group, and has been successful in tapping into a government subsidy program that extends agricultural credit at 4.85% to 1000+ farmers.? The women’s repayment rate? 100%.? And S4S has been given an advisory role with the government.

I ask Manda how the work and income have changed her. “I’m proud,” she says. “And my family is proud too.? I’m no longer just a laborer but a businesswoman who is working at my own pace. You see, I now have a lot of flexibility and am not in the fields all day.”??

I wonder aloud what her dreams are, now that she’s earning a significant income compared to before.?

“I am not yet a dreamer,” she answers matter-of-factly, “…Maybe time with a mentor would help me go to the next level where I can dream, because I’d like to give my daughter the same educational opportunities that we’ve given my son.”

With a glint in her eye, she continues. “But if I were dreaming, I would save to buy a scooter. And then, a car.”

An S4S employee shows us one of the solar dryers

Manda led us upstairs to see the solar dryers located on the rooftop.? The women assure me that cooking is easier with dried onions, and one reminds me that the drying operations require sunshine, “which is clean—and free.”?

Endless emerald fields greet us from the rooftop as the women demonstrate their process.?

Nidhi, Vaibhav and the Acumen crew discuss all the time and money that is saved – each farmer sees her income rise by 20-25%, they spend fewer hours in the fields – and we agree that, while we can measure the amount of food that no longer goes to waste and the increased value to the consumer, what we cannot measure is the pride these women exude.

A critical reason for S4S’s success lies in their ability to take a step back to look at the entire system, recognizing each pain point that held farmers back – and accompanying those farmers to more effectively interact with a system that hadn’t been designed with their welfares in mind.?

“As a child I saw the farmers going daily to the market and leaving whatever was unsold at the end of the day because it was too expensive to cart back home,” Vaibhav shares. “That could amount to between 5 and 30% of their goods – and these were poor people. I started thinking about what it would take to build in more efficiencies to reduce the loss of agricultural products on the one hand and increase farmers’ incomes on the other.”

Acumen's Chief Insights Officer, Amrita Bhandari; India Director, Mahesh Yagnaraman, and I posing with S4S co-founder Nidhi Pant (far left) and some of the S4S team

It's this laser focus on the farmer that sets S4S apart. “Our company only works when market linkages are taken care of in ways that are fair and transparent,” Vaibhav says. And S4S makes a point of accompanying farmers so that they can take advantage of those linkages.?

They’re also dead serious about including those who too easily are overlooked.?

The leader of a group of five women who each have now purchased solar dryers and have businesses of their own, Chaya is one woman whose presence and energy will linger with me for a long time. I asked her how she decided to join S4S.??

“Money, money, money,” she laughed, almost slapping my back.? “I was divorced and penniless and worked as a day laborer to feed my three children, though we often went hungry. Now I have a business and I am taking care of my family. I convinced these other women to start their businesses too,” she said, gesturing at the four women standing on the roof of a small house with us. “And then the husband of the woman who owns this house saw that we were earning good money, so he helped her buy a machine too. Now we are a group.”

We left the rooftop for a factory visit. Though it is the season of monsoons and deliveries are low, women sat at long tables cleaning the dried onions.? Most everyone in this $20 million company is female, all of them role models, all of them gaining income, most gaining confidence, many changing the dynamics within and outside their homes.

“People should be part of the journey of the way we get our food,” Vaibhav and Nidhi state. “If we can support them to do their work better, our company will grow faster. We’ll have more profits to reinvest in expanding this.? We’ll find other smallholder farmers and help them prosper in ways that are good for everyone...

"Our dreams are big. And the world is at a tipping point.”?

It is clear that the old ways are not working, and we need a new approach to, well, most everything. S4S is a role model for what it means to build a farmer-centered company that reduces waste, improves quality, respects the environment, compensates the farmers and is doing this not to reach thousands, but millions.

About Acumen

Acumen?is changing the way the world tackles poverty by investing in companies, leaders and ideas. We invest patient capital in businesses whose products and services are enabling the poor to transform their lives.?Follow Jacqueline on?LinkedIn,?Instagram, and?Twitter.