Financing and Training for Smallholder Farmers
MLC Vanguard | Created by One Acre Fund
One Acre Fund is a social enterprise that supplies financing and training to help smallholders grow their way out of hunger and build lasting pathways to prosperity. We offer a complete bundle of services, using a market-based model that helps our organization remain financially sustainable and expand to reach more and more farmers every year.
11,000,000 Lives Impacted
An astounding seventy percent of the world’s population living in poverty depend on one profession for their livelihood: farming. Yet most of these farmers live in remote areas, and do not have access to basic agricultural tools and training. As a result, they struggle to grow enough to even feed their families, and face an annual “hunger season” of meal-skipping and substitution.
Founded in 2006, One Acre Fund has developed a solution that interrupts this oppressive cycle. Our powerful innovation enables clients to increase their income on supported activities by a historical average of 50%+. This boost enables our clients to alleviate hunger and extreme poverty and unlock their full potential — as farmers and as providers for their families.
Impact is One Acre Fund’s ‘North Star.’ We measure our success by our ability to make farmers more prosperous: historically, we have achieved a 50%+ increase in farm income on supported activities for our clients across diverse country and regional contexts. Importantly, we have found that One Acre Fund farmers invest their new income productively: in more nutritious foods, school fees for their children, and new business ventures. Over time, participating in our program allows farm families to diversify their income, access additional forms of credit, and increase their resilience to shocks. Ultimately, our complete ‘market bundle’ gives farmers the exact tools they need to move swiftly from subsistence to self-reliance (see our Impact Dashboard for key figures: https://oneacrefund.org/impact/).
Each year, our M&E team gathers extensive data on farmer demand, harvests, and more; we then use this information along with the data gathered during the farmers registration process in the Core Program (all of our clients are registered in our database) to verify our impact and improve our model. We utilize two major measurement strategies: First (see Methodology), we routinely conduct roughly 10,000 physical harvest measurements per year, for a group of farmers enrolled in One Acre Fund vs. a comparable comparison group of non-One Acre Fund farmers from the same villages who are subject to the same agro-ecological conditions. We statistically control for any observable differences between program and comparison farmers. This broad sample enables us to cover every country of operation, nearly every crop, and to understand the differential performance of our operating units within countries. For example, we might find that our impact on bean harvests in a particular district is weak, and therefore switch more energy into another crop for that particular district. This highly-actionable information is relatively simple to execute in the field. We utilize practical analytical tools like propensity score matching to even out any differences between our test and control groups. This broad measurement approach enables us to continually improve our impact. Second, we periodically check for bias in these estimates, through highly-rigorous measurement methods: Randomized Control Trials (RCT), and difference-in-difference (diff-in-diff) estimates. We utilize these higher-quality studies to check to make sure that our more routine measurement methods do not have significant bias in their estimates. These studies are substantially harder to execute, and by necessity we do them in one region of a country, and for one crop. These deep evaluations enable us to periodically prove our impact and ongoing measurement.
The Innovation
One Acre Fund is a social enterprise that supplies financing and training to help smallholders grow their way out of hunger and build lasting pathways to prosperity. We offer a complete bundle of services, using a market-based model that helps our organization remain financially sustainable and expand to reach more and more farmers every year.
Our market-based service bundle covers the four main gap areas for a smallholder farmer, including financing of high quality seed and fertilizer, input distribution, modern agricultural trainings, and market facilitation; all of it delivered within walking distance from our clients’ homes. Here’s how our model works:
Asset-Based Loans - Farmers receive high-quality seeds and fertilizer on credit, and we offer a flexible repayment system that allows them to pay back their loans in any amount throughout the loan term.
Delivery - We deliver inputs to locations within walking distance of every farmer we serve.
Training - Farmers receive training throughout the season on modern agricultural techniques
Market Facilitation - We offer crop storage solutions and teach farmers about market fluctuations, so that they can time crop sales to maximize profits.
Every link in this chain is important. If one is missing, then the others won’t have as much impact. One Acre Fund provides all of these services together, enabling farmers to significantly increase their incomes and build paths to prosperity.
Implemented in
Burundi,Malawi,Rwanda,Kenya,Uganda,Zambia,Tanzania
Get in touch
Sarah LaHaye
sarah.lahaye@oneacrefund.org
About One Acre Fund
One Acre Fund is a social enterprise that supplies smallholder farmers in East Africa with asset-based financing and agriculture training services to reduce hunger and poverty. Headquartered in Kakamega, Kenya, the organization works with farmers in rural villages.
Using a market-based approach, One Acre Fund facilitates activities and transactions at various levels of the farming value chain, including seed sourcing and market support.
