“Adama, do you know what you’re earning?”
The question came from her business coach during a training session in Gadana Community, Yobe State. Adama Isiya—mother of six, farmer for over a decade, went silent. She’d planted rice and beans on half a hectare every season for ten years. She knew how to prepare soil, when to plant, how to harvest. But her actual profit? She had no idea.
“Ten years of farming. Not a clue. That question changed everything.”
Adama Isiya
Adama had been doing what her parents taught her: plant when the rains come, harvest when crops mature, sell to whoever shows up at the farm gate. Local traders set the prices. She accepted them. There were no records to check, no costs tracked, no way to know if she was making money or just staying busy.
“We farmed the way our parents taught us, plant, harvest, sell, and trust the middlemen to be fair. Every season I planted without checking what the market wanted, harvested without counting my costs, and sold without knowing my profit. The middlemen did the thinking. I did the sweating. My coach asked me one question I could not answer. Adama, do you know what you are earning? Ten years of farming. Not a clue. That question changed everything.”
Adama Isiya
She was feeding her family and contributing to her community’s food supply. But she wasn’t building anything that could grow.
“The traders did the thinking. I did the sweating.”
What shifted wasn’t her farming ability, it was her access to business infrastructure.
Through Agriarche, a WEAV Capital portfolio company in the Africa Growth Fund, Adama entered a capacity-building program that taught her to run her farm like an enterprise. She learned to plan production costs before planting, track every expense from seeds to labor, research what crops the market actually wanted, and time her sales to avoid the post-harvest price crash when everyone else was selling too.
For the first time, she could answer that question: What am I earning?
“I now plan my costs right from the onset, even before planting. I research what the market demands. I keep records.”
Adama Isiya
The program also provided an input facility loan, 4 bags of fertilizer, crop protection chemicals, improved seeds. Not a handout. Financing she would repay through increased production. It gave her the working capital to implement what she’d learned: expand her land, adopt better techniques, produce more.
She used it to double her cultivated area in the rainy season, from 0.5 hectares to 1 hectare. Then she kept going. In the dry season, she’s now farming 2 hectares. Her yields jumped from 30 bags per harvest to 50 bags.
But the bigger shift was strategic. Adama stopped selling raw produce at farm-gate prices to traders who controlled the margins. She started processing part of her harvest at a peri-urban center and selling directly. Agriarche now aggregates her produce with premium pricing, giving her predictable market access that rewards quality.
Her annual income has increased by over 200%.
The numbers tell part of the story. Adama’s daily reality tells the rest.
She now employs 6 workers, creating jobs in a rural community where formal employment is scarce. She pays for her children’s education without stress. She has a voice in household decisions that extends beyond the farm.
“The improved income enables me to support my family and kids in their wellbeing, and to have a stronger voice in household decision-making.”
This is what becomes possible when barriers get removed. Adama always knew how to farm. What she lacked was what every business needs: capital to purchase inputs strategically, tools to track costs and revenue, skills to plan production around market demand, and direct market connections that don’t extract all the value she creates.
“I expanded my farmland from 0.5 hectares to 1 hectare in the rainy season and up to 2 hectares in the dry season. I now employ more labor: 6 people, provide for my family, support my children’s education, and contribute more actively to household decision-making.”
Adama Isiya
Yobe and Borno States have thousands of women farmers operating exactly where Adama was two years ago, productive but flying blind, capable but locked out of formal financial systems, generating food but not building enterprises they control.
Adama is planning her next phase with the precision of an entrepreneur managing growth.
More land. Better storage. Deeper integration into Agriarche’s supply chain. She’s not asking for help, she’s calculating investment in productive assets based on demonstrated capacity.
The transformation started with a single question she couldn’t answer. Now she can answer it every season, with records that show exactly where her money goes and what it earns. The traders no longer do her thinking. She does her own.
“I have adopted the practice of keeping records, planning my cost right from the onset even prior to planting, and also researching what the market demands.”
Adama Isiya
Nigerian women farmers already grow a significant portion of the country’s food. The challenge isn’t teaching them to farm better, it’s building infrastructure that lets them operate as businesses: credit systems that recognize them as borrowers, market connections that give them pricing power, and training that makes farm economics visible and manageable.
Adama’s farm is now a business. Not because someone gave her a grant, but because someone gave her the tools to see what her work was worth, and the capital to capture it.
