The core mechanism: instead of asking cash-strapped smallholders to buy a $2-3 hermetic storage bag with money they don't have at exactly the moment they need it, let them take the bag on credit from their existing agro-dealer at harvest and repay it -- plus a small fixed margin, not compounding interest -- out of the proceeds when they sell stored grain later at a higher post-lean-season price.

This isn't a new idea in the abstract (input-credit schemes exist for seed and fertilizer), but it has rarely been applied specifically to storage technology, and storage is the one input where the repayment logic is unusually clean: farmers who store grain in a hermetic bag and sell 2-4 months later typically capture a meaningfully higher price than distress-selling at harvest, so the loan is repaid out of a price gain the technology itself creates, not out of unrelated income.

The mechanism runs through agro-dealers who already exist in these markets and already extend informal credit for seed and fertilizer, so this isn't asking anyone to build new distribution infrastructure -- it's asking them to add one more SKU to an existing credit relationship.

A mobile-money-linked repayment (already widely used across Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania for other agricultural inputs) handles collection without requiring farmers to travel back to the dealer.

Government or donor money is used not to subsidize bags directly (which collapses when the grant ends) but to capitalize a loan-guarantee fund that de-risks the agro-dealers' working capital, so the commercial relationship survives the program.

Implementation phases below start narrow -- one crop, one country, dealer networks that already have mobile money rails -- specifically so the model can be evaluated against a control group before anyone claims it works at scale.