OKO Profile

“OKO creates and distributes crop insurance to smallholder farmers in emerging countries, to secure their income and give them access to financial tools. We use simple mobile technologies to be accessible to anyone with a phone, and we automate claim verification using satellite data and images.”

“OKO is on a mission to offer insurance to millions of farmers in Africa to secure their income and improve their lives through financial inclusion.”

“Seed round ($1.2 million) and a few grants.”

“10 people in five different countries. We build the team around talents rather than proximity, which proves sometimes inconvenient but also leads to greater diversity.”

“In 2015, I witnessed the effect of a severe drought in Papua New Guinea (where I was living) on rural customers. Working in micro-insurance (life and health), I realized that I had the tools to create a solution and that I should solve this problem.

I met Shehzad, who had the same experience in Uganda and had the technical skills I was missing. We started working on a solution as part of a MasterCard competition and kept working on this idea despite not winning.”

“The name had to fit many criteria:

• Be short to save space on mobile phone menus/SMS
• Be catchy
• Be easy to pronounce in all languages
• Have a meaning in West Africa (where we started)

We looked for names of mythological figures protective of agriculture and found out about Oko, an Orisha in ancient Nigerian and Benin culture, who is the protector of good harvests. It was the first result in our search and a perfect match.”

“Seeing my dad working long hours under a lot of stress as an entrepreneur, I promised myself not to be an entrepreneur. But then I got frustrated as an employee to give so much dedication in projects without being able to call them my own that I had to make the jump.”

“It was very difficult initially to convince investors that solving this issue could also be a good business. They saw us as candid dreamers who wanted to save the world and who were not going to generate profit. We had to find other sources of funding (accelerators, grants, prizes) to prove that we could bring this to life and generate traction, but it was a difficult start!”

“Mali was our first market. I was lucky enough to know the CEO of Orange Money in Mali and to count on her support at an early stage. Mali is a very agricultural country where mobile penetration is very high, so it was a good place to test our concept.

There is less competition in West Africa as startups often choose to launch initially in Kenya or Tanzania, so we made it our home turf.

Now we are targeting larger markets with more potential and less political and territorial conflicts like Ivory Coast, Ghana or Nigeria.”

“We partner with mobile operators to offer our insurance product as part of their mobile money offering. Mobile operators have the strongest reach in their markets and are pushing mobile financial services.

But we also know that farmers need to be educated about insurance and that we need to build trust, so we invest a lot in building a local network of agents and representatives at the local level.”

“Instead of working on the full solution, we just packaged an existing insurance product to sell it via mobile money. We selected a commune, rented an office in the village, painted our logo on it, and started to visit nearby farms.”

“Cost of customer acquisition: a lot of efforts are needed to onboard rural customers but we need to ensure we don't spend more than we can collect

Retention: given the efforts needed to onboard customers initially, it is key for us to keep them active for a few years

Average sales per day per agent: we keep testing different models to find something that works both for us and for the agents that we hire.”

“Book: ‘The Business Solution to Poverty: Designing Products and Services for Three Billion New Customers.’”

“‘Ain't No Mountain High Enough’ by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell.”

“Google Spreadsheet.”

“How high are the highs, and how low are the lows.”

“I force myself (and I am forced by my spouse) to block some time in my weekly schedule for myself and my family.”

“To-do lists. Small but frequent breaks.”

“Learn to say NO.”

“I was a business management consultant. It taught me that you can quickly become an expert in a topic if you speak to the right people. And it also taught me how PowerPoint and Excel can solve most problems”

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