One Acre Fund: Scaling Strategies to Change the Lives of Smallholder Farm Families
As part of this Scaling Snapshot, see also One Acre Fund’s Organizational Overview, Getting Ready for Scale, and Scaling Pearls of Wisdom. You can find the full scaling snapshot PDF here.
As One Acre Fund began to scale around 2011, after spending several years positioning itself for such, it pursued a range of scaling strategies to simultaneously expand its core model while also engaging and influencing other actors to drive broader change. Below you will find more detail about those strategies, along with the organizational implications for pursuing each.
STRATEGY: EXPANSION WITHIN AND ACROSS COUNTRIES
The bulk of One Acre Fund’s resources and time is spent on the growth of its core model, directly managed by One Acre Fund itself. The organization sees its highest level of impact through direct implementation, which has grown at the annual rate of 30–40% over the last twelve years — serving 809,800 farmers by the end of 2018. The organization also continues to pursue greater social return on investment (SROI, calculated by One Acre Fund as total impact generated divided by the net cost required to create that impact) through its core model, identifying cost efficiencies, and increasing impact as it scales.
Expansion Within Existing Countries
One Acre Fund prioritizes expansion within existing countries over expansion to new countries in order to meet the needs of farmers while taking advantage of economies of scale, established relationships, word of mouth, and the bundle as refined for a particular country. Within any one country, One Acre Fund works to increase density (i.e., adding more farmers in a particular area already being served) and then to increase coverage (i.e., adding new sites and growing to new regions).
“[One Acre Fund] has a clear hierarchy of growth: first “growing in” by increasing client density within existing areas, then “growing out” with new areas within a current country operation and, finally, new country expansion.“ - Bain & Company’s Growing Prosperity
Expansion to New Countries
One Acre Fund’s New Country Expansion team works through a rigorous, three-stage process to establish the right locations and timing for new country expansion, including:
- Conducting market analysis through desk research to understand the opportunity in countries where smallholder farmers reside, looking at factors ranging from need-level to population density, macro- environment, and agro-ecological environment.
- Scouting the markets — in person — to gain a better understanding of the market (e.g., operating environment and baseline seed and fertilizer use) to see if One Acre Fund’s model could be successful there.
- Conducting a small pilot with 100–200 farmers, and then larger pilots of 500–1,500 farmers, to verify core metrics and inform the decision whether to launch full operations.
Of Note for Direct Expansion Efforts to Increase Efficiency and Impact
As One Acre Fund expands its core program, it seeks opportunities to increase program efficiencies and ultimate impact on farm families. Two formal initiatives allow the organization to do so methodically and strategically: Healthy Growth Path and the Scale Innovations Team.
Healthy Growth Path
Making decisions about how and where to allocate scarce resources can be challenging for social enterprises. Therefore, One Acre Fund has used its SROI metric to create a tool called the “healthy growth path” to guide decisions about client and programmatic expansion both within and across countries.
- With this tool, One Acre Fund plots two healthy growth paths: one for higher-need regions (where clients face greater challenges and therefore the organization acknowledges reality of slightly lower SROI values) and another for lower-need regions. Using historical and projected SROI data, One Acre Fund plots each country of operation against its relevant path. In areas where programs are operating above their healthy growth path, One Acre Fund often recommends accelerated growth and considers experimenting with the addition of new impact areas.
- These new impact areas stem from One Acre Fund’s expanded long-term vision, which now includes achievement of “healthy families and rich soil” in addition to “big harvests.” This commitment has led the organization to undertake new programming related to improved nutrition, reduction of the hunger season, and promotion of soil health.
- In areas where programs are operating below their relevant healthy path, One Acre Fund slows growth in order to focus on improving implementation and achieving the baseline SROI value.
Scale Innovations Team
One Acre Fund’s Scale Innovations team develops solutions to challenges highlighted by the Healthy Growth Path or by the organization’s other reporting and tracking mechanisms. The team tackles common obstacles that appear during organizational growth, such as increased operational complexity, insufficient resources, and inflexibility in adjusting models. The team proactively identifies operational improvements to increase number of clients, impact per customer, and social return on investment. As an organization, One Acre Fund then tests, refines, and — if appropriate — rolls out such solutions beyond the pilot site.
YOU SHOULD KNOW: Implications of Direct Expansion
Impact: Direct implementation allows One Acre Fund to tightly control program outcomes and quality.
Impact Level Standards: Given the relative feasibility of measuring direct implementation outcomes as opposed to indirect activity outcomes, One Acre Fund finds that funders have high expectations for evidence related to direct implementation.
Resource Needs: Expansion to new countries is labor intensive — in both the piloting phase and the formal launch. One Acre Fund currently employs approximately 7,300 full-time equivalents (FTEs) within its nine countries of operation.
Pace of Growth: Funders often want One Acre Fund to grow and add services quickly in new sites, but the organization believes it is critical to pace growth, starting with the core model and ensuring it is robust before adding on additional program layers.
Unique Customer Needs: While One Acre Fund delivers a core market bundle across all geographies, there are unique customer needs in each new geography — even within the same country. Listening to customers in each new geography, and adapting the bundle as needed, is essential to success.
Indirect Reach: One Acre Fund has found that farmers who are not customers but live in close proximity for at least four years to other One Acre Fund core program customers, also achieve improved yields.
Leveraging Relationships & Reputation: Expanding coverage within an existing country leverages established relationships and word of mouth.
Institutional Knowledge: Each new geography is slightly easier to enter because there is significant institutional knowledge that can be shared across geographies — particularly those within the same region.
New Ground for Innovation: Expansion to new countries provides opportunities to further adapt, test, and iterate One Acre Fund’s approach. For example, pilots in Southeast Asia have allowed the organization to experiment with new crops.
STRATEGY: ENABLING OPERATIONAL PARTNERS
One Acre Fund’s large-scale partnerships with public and private actors aim to fundamentally improve an agriculture system for all farmers in a region or country.
One Acre Fund partners with large-scale actors to share its best practices around farmer training, typically to help an existing infrastructure or system achieve greater impact. To achieve this work, its activities span from providing training materials to leading direct training to embedding staff in support of a more robust training program. One Acre Fund also leverages partnerships to improve the enabling environment for farmers, including access to improved seeds and related income-generation opportunities. By 2020, it expects to reach 2 million farmers indirectly through these training and support partnerships.
Training
As an example of extending impact through the public sector, One Acre Fund has partnered with the Rwandan Ministry of Agriculture (MINAGRI) to provide training and tools for the government’s agriculture extension network; work has included incorporating an active learning approach and providing a robust two-way SMS and hotline system for communications and monitoring. The expansion of this effort, funded by the Innovation Investment Alliance (a funding collaboration between the Skoll Foundation and U.S. Agency for International Development, supported by Mercy Corps), is estimated to serve over 500,000 farmers via MINAGRI’s extension program by the end of 2018.
Private Sector Partnerships
One Acre Fund also partners with private sector actors and NGOs to bolster their ability to support smallholder farmers. One example relates to the challenges Rwandan farmers have faced in relying heavily on imported seed, such as the high cost of imports, unreliable supply, and the seeds not being well adapted to Rwandan climate conditions. One Acre Fund is helping to address this gap in the market by launching a partnership with the two private-sector stakeholders, Agro Processing Industries and Western Seed Company, to begin production of locally developed hybrid maize seed in Rwanda. The project provides an opportunity to build a new local industry benefiting farmers nationwide and ideally boosting adoption of the improved hybrid seeds by cutting the long-term costs. In another example of engaging private-sector partners to increase impact on farmers, One Acre Fund is running trials with local egg hatcheries and small-scale micro-brooders in Kenya and Rwanda to deliver poultry to One Acre Fund’s client farmers. The organization believes the poultry partnership provides an exciting opportunity to open up new revenue streams for farmers (e.g., egg sales) and to improve family nutrition by increasing access to protein.
Seeding Related Ventures
One other way in which One Acre Fund has experimented with partnerships is to provide support and funding to other agricultural start-ups in the hopes that complementary approaches could achieve greater reach and impact. For example, One Acre Fund was one of several organizations to provide seed capital to MyAgro (founded by One Acre Fund alumna, Anushka Ratnayake). While MyAgro has achieved very strong success, One Acre Fund realized this was not a scalable form of partnership given the challenge of identifying other appropriate ventures in which to invest.
YOU SHOULD KNOW: Implications of Enabling Partners
Reputation: One Acre Fund’s willingness to share its materials and support other partners in their own work often bolsters the organization’s relationship with its government partners, who see One Acre Fund as helpful and as a team player.
Program Enrollment: One Acre Fund sometimes sees that farmers it reaches indirectly ultimately enroll within its program.
Measurement: In its partnership work, One Acre Fund carefully measures two levels of impact: the direct-level impact on farmers reached and the systems-level impact to ensure that the underlying system is operating more efficiently and effectively. Measuring the systems-level impact is challenging but critical to One Acre Fund’s theory of change; one example includes tracking seed sales at local agro-dealer shops to see if campaigns promoting improved agricultural techniques are accompanied by increased purchase of improved seed varieties.
STRATEGY: GLOBAL ADVOCACY
One Acre Fund plays a role in shaping global policy and practice in support of smallholder farmers.
One focus of One Acre Fund’s global advocacy effort has been mobilizing the global microfinance industry to extend and adapt its offerings in rural settings to better serve smallholder farmers. In pursuit of this mission, One Acre Fund, in collaboration with five other industry-leading partners (including BRAC and Opportunity International) launched Propagate — a network and coalition of microfinance practitioners with deep expertise in smallholder finance who advocate for financing services for this population.
Another priority for One Acre Fund is influencing agricultural policy globally in support of smallholder farmers. In 2016, it was one of two NGOs to testify before a US Congressional Committee to support passage of the Global Food Security Act, permanently authorizing the US Government’s $1 billion Feed the Future Program.
One Acre Fund also participates in market-building activities, such as providing data to seed manufacturers to help them create more robust products for the market and supporting the growth of seed manufacturing in key areas where availability is limited.
YOU SHOULD KNOW: Implications of Influencing the Enabling Environment
Risk: Taking on market-building efforts — in particular, influencing manufacturing locations — is a risk for One Acre Fund as an organization as those efforts are outside its core competencies. However, the effort is essential for farmers, so One Acre Fund accepts the risk with careful monitoring.
Impact: As is true for many global advocacy efforts, measuring and communicating impact (particularly to funders) is challenging.
Patience: One Acre Fund’s global advocacy work requires a long-term, patient strategy, as it may have to wait (sometimes several years) for the right window of opportunity to influence a policy priority.
Published September March 2019. Find the full Scaling Snapshot PDF at https://rebrand.ly/oneacrefundscaling.
Authored by Erin Worsham, Kimberly Langsam, and Ellen Martin.
