What is One Acre Fund?

As part of this Scaling Snapshot, see also One Acre Fund’s Getting Ready for Scale, Scaling Strategies, and Scaling Pearls of Wisdom. You can find the full scaling snapshot PDF here.

Organizational Overview

The Audacious Goal: One Acre Fund envisions a future in which every farm family has the knowledge and means to achieve big harvests, support healthy families, and cultivate rich soils. By 2030, One Acre Fund aims to reach at least 4 million farmers (and their families, including 16 million children) through its core programs, generating at least US$150 in annual new farm income per family on supported activities.

The Problem: Ironically, the majority of the world’s hungriest people are farmers. More than 50 million smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa alone are unable to grow enough food to feed their families, are isolated from markets, and experience malnutrition and poverty.

The Solution: One Acre Fund uses a market- based strategy to supply financing, access to quality inputs, and training to help smallholder farmers increase their yields and access to markets — resulting in increases in farmer income potential and in related family and community health.

The Impact: By the end of 2018, One Acre Fund had served 809,800 farmers through its core programming, helping them grow their income by an average of US$115 per year¹ — an income increase of more than 50% on supported activities.

The Model-in-Brief: One Acre Fund provides smallholder farmers with a holistic bundle of services to bolster their productivity and ability to generate income from their crops. The bundle, marketed and supported by local field officers, includes the key inputs along the farming value chain: loan packages for seed and fertilizer, distribution of farm inputs within walking distance, training on agricultural techniques, and market facilitation to maximize harvest profits. Farmers can take advantage of flexible repayment systems to pay back their loans to One Acre Fund. The organization has achieved an average 98% repayment rate, and uses this earned revenue to sustain about 75% of its field operations.

The Core Innovation: Market-Driven Approach. One Acre Fund’s market-driven approach ensures that its work aligns closely with customer needs and optimizes products for specific markets. To achieve this alignment, it has developed a robust, data-driven approach to testing, monitoring, and innovating.

READ NEXT: One Acre Fund, Getting Ready for Scale.

Published September March 2019. Find the full Scaling Snapshot PDF at https://rebrand.ly/oneacrefundscaling.
Authored by Erin Worsham, Kimberly Langsam, and Ellen Martin.

1. Note that “$115 per year” is a three-year average from 2016–18. One Acre Fund calculates this number as a multi-year average given variance in agricultural outputs year-over- year due to external factors such as weather.