My Hometown Farm Market

Marketplace app for farmers, buyers and field agents including USSD flows for rural access

An IFAD-assisted Life-ND project. Farmers in rural areas with no smartphone can access the platform via USSD on a feature phone. Designed USSD flows alongside the mobile app to ensure zero-barrier entry for three user roles: farmer, buyer, and field agent.

3 User roles
App + USSD Access
IFAD Life-ND Programme

The context

This is early work and I include it because the constraint was unusual and shaped how I think about access. Designing a marketplace that degrades gracefully to USSD forces you to decide what is genuinely essential in a transaction.

The challenge

Rural farmers in Nigeria have limited smartphone access but still need a way to list produce, find buyers, and coordinate with field agents. The platform had to work across three very different user types with different technical literacy, device access, and goals.

Designing for two surfaces at once

The mobile app and USSD flow had to carry the same core transaction without sharing a single interface element. Every decision on the app side was tested against the question: can this work over a four-digit keypad? That constraint cut scope deliberately and made the mobile app cleaner for it.

Three roles, one system

Each user type needed a distinct experience: farmers needed simple listing creation with photo upload, buyers needed filtered search and direct contact, and field agents needed a lightweight dashboard to manage and verify farmer listings on behalf of those without phones.

What I took away

Access is a design constraint, not an afterthought. Building for the lowest-capability surface first produced better decisions for every surface above it. This project shaped how I approach multi-role systems and inclusive product design.