A Story of a young Entrepreneur Transforming Rice Farming in Potiskum

At 18, Habiba Adamu Usman Has Already Figured Out What Many Smallholder Farmers Spend Decades Learning: Farming Is a Business, Not Just a Livelihood

Habiba lives on Adamu Waziri Street in Jajere, Potiskum Local Government Area, Yobe Staten in Nigeria. She cultivates rice on half a hectare of family land, sews, knits, and just earned her National Certificate in Education from the Federal College of Education, Potiskum.

She paid for that degree herself. With farming income.

Three years into rice cultivation, Habiba was harvesting 10-15 bags per season from her family’s land, enough to cover her school fees and household needs when combined with her artisanal work. She sold raw paddy rice through market representatives and middlemen at Potiskum market, navigating familiar price volatility. Sometimes she stored her produce and waited for better prices. Sometimes she sold immediately because she needed cash for school fees.

She was making it work. But she was constrained by the same barriers facing most young farmers: limited working capital for quality inputs, no direct market access, and farming knowledge passed down through practice rather than structured business training.

The shift came through Agriarche, a Chui Ventures portfolio company in the Africa Growth Fund.

Habiba accessed input financing for fertilizer and crop protection chemicals, paired with business training from Sustainable Business Consulting that taught her something her formal education hadn’t: how to treat farming as an enterprise with measurable inputs, outputs, and margins.

She learned to document every expenditure, plan costs before planting, and calculate profit after harvest. Financial literacy made farm economics legible for the first time.

“The training changed how I think. Now I know my costs before I plant. I know my profit when I sell. And I know what I need to grow further. That’s something I never had before.”

With quality inputs deployed strategically and a structured approach to farm management, Habiba intensified production and expanded her labor force to 7 workers, creating employment in a region where formal jobs for young people are scarce. Agriarche’s aggregation arrangement gave her an alternative to middlemen, offering competitive pricing and direct market access that reduced her dependency on exploitative informal channels.

Her annual income has increased by over 200% since the intervention. She fully understands her cost structure now, plans her planting around calculated margins, and will repay the loan after harvest—not as a beneficiary, but as a creditworthy entrepreneur managing working capital and building a credit history that opens doors to larger financing.

“The combination of input loans and training has enabled me to expand farm operations, hire more labor, and improve support to my family livelihood.”

At 18, Habiba is building what most impact investors talk about but rarely demonstrate at scale: a diversified rural enterprise creating jobs, generating income, and strengthening local food systems. She didn’t need a decade of experience to get there. She needed access to capital, business training, and market infrastructure that recognized her as an economic actor rather than a smallholder waiting for help.

Her plan is precise: expand to larger hectarage, diversify crop production, professionalize operations with more structured labor management, and leverage Agriarche’s market connections for consistent offtake at fair prices.

Habiba represents what’s possible when impact capital meets Nigeria’s food system at the right intervention point, not extractive lending, but developmental finance that builds capability alongside capital access. She’s already educated, already entrepreneurial, already productive. What she lacked was working capital and business infrastructure.

Now she has both. And she’s just getting started.