For Seven Years, the Math Never Worked

Helen Dung has been planting potatoes twice a year on one and a half hectares in Fan Community, Barkin Ladi, Plateau State in Nigeria for seven years now. She is managing the land while raising seven children and keeping a household running on whatever the farm produces. She knows the rhythm of the seasons, can read the weather, understands when to plant and when to harvest.

But every planting season, the same problem surfaced: by the time she needed money for inputs, there wasn’t any. The previous harvest had gone to school fees, household expenses, debts from the last cycle. So she’d plant late, sometimes weeks late, waiting for cash that came too slowly or didn’t come at all. Late planting meant smaller yields. Ten bags per season when the land could easily give five times that if she could just start on time.

Those ten bags sold to whoever showed up first at her farm gate. Usually middlemen who understood exactly how the timing worked, harvest season meant every farmer was selling at once, which meant prices dropped, which meant Helen took what she could get. The potatoes were already harvested, the school fees were due, and she had no storage to wait for better prices.

She knew those same potatoes were selling for multiples of what she received once they reached urban markets. She knew if she could access working capital for quality inputs and plant on time, her yields would transform. She knew if she could connect to better buyers instead of selling alone at her gate, the price would transform too.

Helen understood exactly where the system was breaking down. What she lacked was working capital to break the late-planting cycle, market connections that paid fairly, and the leverage that comes from selling collectively instead of alone.

“Potatoes remain the backbone of my household income. But before, once I paid school fees, the money was finished, and I had no capital left to buy inputs for the next season.”

Helen Yohanna Dung

The first thing that changed was simple: timing. Through Pricepally, a company from Chui Ventures partner with the Africa Growth Fund, Helen accessed working capital for seeds and fertilizer before the planting season started, not after, not halfway through, but before it began. She planted on time for the first time in years. That shift alone changed her yields dramatically, but it still wasn’t enough to break the cycle, just enough to produce more potatoes she’d still have to sell cheap at the farm gate to the same buyers.

What actually broke the cycle was market access. PricePally connected Helen to a collective marketing model where she sold alongside other farmers as a group instead of standing alone at her farm gate negotiating with a single buyer. Together, they reached different markets and received different prices, the kind of prices Helen used to wonder about when she imagined where her potatoes ended up and what they sold for once they got there. The price she received more than doubled overnight. Same potatoes, same farm, completely different position in the value chain.

But the thing Helen talks about most isn’t the capital or even the market access. It’s the training that taught her to track every expense, record every sale, and calculate her actual profit for the first time in seven years of farming. She’d been working all that time without knowing whether the work was actually working. The moment she sat down with a notebook and added up the numbers she’d never written down before, everything shifted.

“The day I learned how to calculate my profits is the day I realized that farming is not just work, but a business that must be planned and managed well.”

Helen Yohanna Dung

Helen’s yields went from ten bags to fifty bags per season. Her income multiplied several times over. She plants on time now with working capital instead of scrambling for cash, pays school fees without panic, puts better food on the table. Her farm employs five workers from her community, people earning steady income because her business expanded. She’s planning to grow to two hectares and diversify into other crops so she has revenue flowing year-round instead of only twice a year when potatoes harvest.

“I can now pay school fees for my children comfortably, and I can afford better food at home. The day I learnt how to calculate my profits is the day I realized farming is not just work, but also a business, and this business must be planned.”

Helen Yohanna Dung

But what matters as much as what’s happening on Helen’s farm is what’s happening around it. She talks to other women farmers now, shows them her records, explains the math she learned to do. Some have started keeping their own notebooks, tracking their own numbers, asking their own questions about what might be possible if the system worked differently for them too.

“I used to see myself only as a farmer. Now I see myself as a farmer and a businesswoman”

Helen Yohanna Dung

The land and the potatoes are the same. What changed was access to three things that should never have been rare: capital that arrived on time so she could plant when planting was supposed to happen, market connections that paid her fairly instead of extracting most of the value her work created, and business training that made farm economics visible instead of invisible.

Plateau State has thousands of women farming potatoes the way Helen used to, working hard, staying stuck, feeding Nigeria’s cities while barely feeding their own families. Not because they can’t farm, but because the system wasn’t built to work for them. Helen figured out how to make it work. Now she’s showing others it’s possible because she finally got access to things that shouldn’t be exceptional: fair prices, working capital, and the ability to see whether her work was actually paying off.

The cycle broke. What comes next is what Helen builds in the space that opens up when you’re not just trying to survive each season but can actually plan for the next one and the one after that. She’s already building.