Connecting the Last Mile: Bringing Agricultural Markets to Farmers' Doorsteps in West Africa
An Absent Market
Sogola is a farming village about 70 kilometers from the nearest town of Bougouni in southern Mali. Mery Diakite has worked his land here for years, growing maize, millet, groundnuts, and cotton.
The Sahel is a semi-arid belt in the northern part of Africa—between the Sahara and the savanna—where arable land is widely available but the soil is nutrient-poor and increasingly degraded by desertification. Without modern agricultural inputs like fertilizers, improved seeds, and crop protection products, the land yields little. Yet across this region, farmers face high prices for inputs, limited access to credit, and a distribution network that rarely reaches their villages.
For Mery, getting those inputs meant a journey.
“I had to travel between 40 and 60 kilometers to buy inputs. It was very difficult.”
A photo of Mery Diakite. Credit: Mr. Yadji Sangare
A photo of Mery Diakite. Credit: Mr. Yadji Sangare
Agriculture in Mali is primarily composed of smallholder farmers who face multiple challenges to improve their yields and increase profitability, including limited access to fertilizers, seeds, insecticides, credit, and water. Yet agriculture remains a driving force of the economy, accounting for 33 percent of GDP and employing the majority of the rural population (International Trade Administration).
Apart from the occasional weekly markets where agricultural products are rarely available, the markets where farmers like Mery can browse and buy quality inputs are called spot markets: one-time events organized almost exclusively in secondary towns and cities, typically around the start of planting season, where farmers pay in full and take products home immediately.
The timing works against them. Planting season is precisely when farmers have spent down their savings from the previous harvest and have the least cash on hand. Even when Mery could scrape together enough money to make a purchase, he had to transport heavy bags, some weighing over 50 kilograms, back to his village over untarmacked roads. And orders placed at these markets often arrived late.
"I could not get these products on time, which reduced my production."
Mery's experience is far from unusual. In a baseline survey conducted across farming communities in four regions of Mali, 70 percent of farmers reported that they had not had access to an agro-input dealer in their village in the prior agricultural season. These findings are consistent with other Sahelian zones: In northern Ghana, 60 to 70 percent of farmers must travel to local towns to purchase inputs.
The reasons run deeper than distance.
The cost of transporting inputs to rural markets accounts for roughly one-third of the total price. For dealers, extending into rural areas made little financial sense. They lacked information about existing demand in remote villages. Storage facilities were inadequate, increasing the risk that products deteriorated before they reached farmers. For farmers, weather uncertainty compressed demand for inputs into a few weeks around the first rains, and small-scale dealers working through informal supply chains struggled to procure enough stock to meet it. Weak telecommunications networks made coordinating orders across distances unreliable.
This is what economists call the last mile problem: the accumulated weight of infrastructure gaps, logistics costs, thin markets, and fluctuating farmer incomes that severs the final link in the supply chain.
Closing that gap would require bringing both sides of the market together, in the villages themselves.
Bringing the Market Closer: Village Input Fairs
Village Input Fairs are built on a simple idea: if farmers cannot get to the market, the market must come to them.
Fairs are one-day commercial events that bring agro-input dealers and farmers together to buy and sell agricultural inputs directly in the village. Unlike the spot markets in secondary towns that farmers like Mery had relied on, Village Input Fairs are organized in the villages themselves, during the post-harvest season when farmers have the most cash on hand from crop sales.
The idea grew out of earlier research in Burkina Faso. Andrew Dillon, a development economist at Northwestern University, and his colleagues Maria Porter and Aissatou Ouedraogo were studying in Burkina Faso why few smallholder sorghum farmers were adopting improved agricultural technologies like micro-dosing, a technique that applies small, precise amounts of fertilizer at the base of each plant to raise yields at lower cost. Despite training and access to improved seeds, adoption remained low.
That insight led them to test a new approach in Burkina Faso: one-day input fairs organized in villages during the post-harvest season, where farmers could pre-order fertilizer with a small 5 percent deposit. This initial study showed promise, with take-up rates significantly higher at post-harvest fairs than at subsidized planting-season markets.
Building on those results, Dillon and Nicolò Tomaselli, a visiting scholar at Northwestern University who was the Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) Burkina Faso Country Director during the study, designed a more rigorous evaluation and brought the model to Mali. Together with IPA Mali, they partnered with the National Union of Agro-Input Dealers (UNRIA), a network of at least 950 agricultural input dealers to organize and evaluate fairs across 140 villages from 2017 to 2019.
"The Village Input Fair supports aggregate demand on one side, so you aggregate farmers in the village, but at the same time generates conditions so that agro-dealers can actually supply agricultural inputs to those farmers."
Nicolò Tomaselli, Visiting Scholar at Northwestern University and Former IPA Burkina Faso Country Director
How a Village Input Fair Works
Organizers map villages with high demand for inputs but no connection to markets. Input dealers bid at auctions for licenses to sell at the fairs, receiving information about each village's number of producers, their expected demand for inputs, and access conditions. Each village is assigned between one and two dealers.
Organizers visit each village once or twice before the fair. In the first round, field agents meet with the village chief, women's groups, youth representatives, cotton producer representatives, and cooperative leaders. They explain how the fair will work and propose a date. The village then deliberates. In the second round, agents return to confirm the date or adjust it if it conflicts with traditional activities or other events. Between visits, town criers spread the word within the village. Radio announcements, SMS, and WhatsApp messages go out to the wider area.
From 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., farmers browse input offerings from agricultural dealers. If they want to buy, they place a pre-order with a 10 percent deposit, an amount most farmers can afford with post-harvest cash on hand. The deposit commits both parties: the farmer to the purchase, the dealer to the delivery.
Two elements are central to why the fairs work well. First, demand aggregation: by concentrating many farmers in one place, Village Input Fairs give dealers a reason to serve villages they would otherwise never visit. Second, third-party verification: deposits are collected and held in a blocked account by the organizer, and all commercial transactions are conducted publicly, creating accountability on both sides. Dealers know farmers will face social pressure to honor their commitments to purchase. Farmers know a dealer who fails to deliver will damage their reputation with an entire village, not just one buyer.
During planting season, dealers deliver inputs in bulk directly to the villages. Farmers pay the remaining balance before delivery or on the same day. Bulk delivery keeps costs down for dealers, and farmers can verify input quality before accepting the order.
Farmers planted with the inputs they need. At harvest they have higher yields, higher incomes.
Tomaselli described the physical infrastructure of a Village Input Fair: "It's like a big banner, a plastic banner that is shown to the villagers. Maybe some music to attract the villagers to the day of the fair. And then some ropes to define the area. And these ropes are tied between trees so that you can have an entry and an exit. This is what it takes to do a fair in a village. It doesn't need to be fancy or complicated."
The simplicity is deliberate. Each fair costs approximately USD 100-400 to organize. And the fairs themselves generate revenue: dealers pay for their licenses through the auction system, allowing the organizing firm to partly recover costs.
"Not only is the fair quite cost-savvy, but the fair itself generates some revenues directly."
For fair organizers, earning the trust of farmers and input dealers is essential to getting participation. Mr. Yadji Sangare is the founder of Massaran, one of the local agricultural organizations that run the fairs in the Bougouni region. Sangare drew on his own standing to rebuild confidence in a village that had lost trust in a previous fair organizer. As an input seller, president of the region's young farmers' association, and a member of the Chamber of Agriculture, he was already in contact with farmer leaders across villages and communes.
What the Evidence Showed
Village Input Fairs are designed to stimulate the formation of self-sustaining agricultural markets. But does market design actually matter? Can the way a market is organized change whether farmers buy inputs and how much they invest in their farms?
IPA with Dillon and Tomaselli conducted a randomized evaluation in Mali across 140 villages in Sikasso, Koulikoro, Kangaba, and Bananba. Communities were randomly assigned to one of seven groups. Six received different versions of the fair. One served as a comparison group with no fair organized.
The variations tested three dimensions of market design: timing (fairs organized during the post-harvest season versus the planting season), commitment level (a 10 percent deposit versus a 50 percent deposit on pre-orders), and liquidity (whether farmers were offered credit through the local microfinance institution Soro Yiriwaso). The combination yielded six distinct fair models, each organized in 20 villages.
The study found:
Demand for DAP fertilizer—which farmers perceived as addressing their soil’s phosphorous deficiency—increased by 24 to 28 percent in post-harvest fairs. Adding credit to the contracts increased demand for certain fertilizers, particularly urea, and improved order fulfillment rates.
Fertilizer adoption increased by 9.5 to 13.7 percentage points among farmers who had never used it before: Fairs reached households that had previously been locked out of input markets entirely.
Household agricultural labor increased due to increased input use.
Key findings on market access, crop decisions, and deposit design:
- Giving farmers access to a market did not, on its own, change purchasing behavior: Spot markets organized during the planting season without credit access had no statistically significant effect on demand for inputs.
- Households that purchased seeds opted into higher value cereal and legume crops like rice and peanuts and away from subsistence crops like millet.
- Deposit commitment made little difference but affected participation: Demand effects were similar when farmers placed a 10 percent or 50 percent deposit, but not everybody participated in the fairs with the 50 percent deposit because village leaders thought this was too high and too risky for their farmers.
The most critical aspect is that the timing of the fair was a stand-in for farmers’ liquidity.
That is, farmers had the most cash on hand during the post-harvest markets, which removed their financial constraints, allowing them to more easily order inputs and plan ahead for their agricultural season.
Village Input Fairs Scale Across West Africa
Armed with the evidence from Mali, Dillon and Tomaselli refined the design of the post harvest fairs to be as cost-effective and simple as possible. This involved keeping the 10 percent deposit commitment and dropping the credit component. While credit had boosted urea fertilizer demand and improved fulfillment rates during the evaluation, involving microfinance institutions in the organizing process was found to be overly complex.
Importantly, by being located in the villages and open to all households, the fairs have increased inclusivity. That means underserved groups including women, people with disabilities, and others without transportation are able to participate in the fairs.
To sustain the market-driven model, Dillon and Tomaselli founded the Village Input Fairs Fund, a U.S. nonprofit that creates social enterprises in each country to organize the fairs. The first one, Sene Sugu Folo in Mali, operationalizes the research insights with private sector incentives, partnering with agro-dealers and introducing innovative digital tools to track and manage purchase orders.
The fairs have expanded beyond Mali to Northern Ghana, Northern Côte d'Ivoire, and soon in Senegal.
These efforts have also brought new opportunities to measure the impact of fairs: selling organic inputs in Ghana and providing soil information alongside inputs in Côte d'Ivoire.
Mali
- 2017-2019: Original evaluation in 140 villages in Sikasso, Koulikoro, Kangaba, and Bananba
- 2022-2024: Second randomized evaluation in 150 villages in Sikasso and Bougouni over 2 years
- 495 fairs organized over 7 years
- Reaching approximately 60,000 farmers
- In 2026, 95 fairs organized by Sene Sugu Folo generated 40 million CFA (approximately USD 81,000)
- 200 fairs targeted in 2026 agricultural season
Northern Ghana
- Expansion starting in 2024 with IPA Ghana
- 60 fairs organized in 2025. 3,000+ households and 23,000+ adult farmers reached within the first year.
- 100 villages reached in the 2026 agricultural season
Northern Côte d’Ivoire
- 60 targeted in 2026 agricultural season
- Partnership developed supported by UJALA/J-PAL with the fertilizer company OCP
As the Village Input Fairs spread across West Africa's Sahel, the self-sustaining markets operating in its rural communities—bringing livelihood-changing inputs to farmers and welding the broken links in the supply chain—can ensure lasting impact.
Written by Florence Dzame and Michael Podesta | Videos Edited by Oswald Suonbai-kyi | Designed by Cara Vu via Shorthand
Special thanks to Andrew Dillon and Nicolo Tomaselli, Mr. Yadji Sangare, and the IPA Francophone West Africa team for their contributions.
Photography Credits:
Connecting the Last Mile and An Absent Market: Photo of Mery Diakite courtesy of Mr. Yadji Sangare. Photo of field in Mali courtesy of Torsten Pursche/Shutterstock.com. All other photos courtesy of Edward Akwaah Mensah.
Bringing the Market Closer: All photos courtesy of Edward Akwaah Mensah.
How a Village Input Fair Works: Photo of auction courtesy of IPA. Photo of rice field courtesy of angin hiqaru87/Shutterstock.com. All other photos courtesy of Edward Akwaah Mensah and Kany Sissoko.
What the Evidence Showed and Village Input Fairs Scale Across West Africa: Photos courtesy of Edward Akwaah Mensah and Kany Sissoko.
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