Leading the Charge to Eradicate Rural Poverty

Our prior project with the Dutch Government, “Subsistence to Self-Reliance – Bringing the Power of Markets to Africa’s Lowest-Income Farmers” underscored our shared passion for inclusive economic development and showcased the key milestones that we can accomplish together. Core operating support from DGIS facilitated the strategic expansion of One Acre Fund’s ‘impact ecosystem.’ Within two years, we doubled the scale of our farmer network, launched operations in two new country programs (Malawi and Uganda), and rolled out impactful new products like tree planting kits and clean cookstoves at country-wide scale. Simultaneously, we refined our innovative systems-change platform, leveraging our core organizational competencies to improve large-scale public and private actors’ service to smallholders. This success has now placed One Acre Fund in a position where we can realistically envision moving the needle on hunger and poverty across the entire African continent. Our current project with DGIS, “Leading the Charge to Eradicate Rural Poverty,” aims to capture this powerful opportunity. The project involves a smartly structured two-part investment spanning September 15, 2018 – December 31, 2022: First, DGIS is once again providing critical support to the varied, evolving platforms within our organization that lay the foundation for our growth and impact. Core operating support from DGIS will enhance and extend One Acre Fund’s proven model by funding key strategic priorities across our M&E, R&D, and new country expansion units. Secondly, DGIS is also providing working capital to revolutionize One Acre Fund’s growth trajectory. This injection to our ‘permanent fund’ will completely fund our projected expansion of 245,000+ new farm families in 2019, bringing us past the 1 millionth farmer milestone. Crucially, farmers’ loan repayments will replenish our permanent fund each year, allowing us to re-extend this contribution to provide input loans to an estimated 245,000 farm families (including over 980,000 children) annually. This project will anchor One Acre Fund’s expansion to directly serve 1.85 million farm families annually by year-end 2022. Simultaneously, it will help us reach an additional 3.5 million farmers via systems-change partnerships that are expressly designed to transform entire agricultural ecosystems. Together, the reach of these efforts will generate transformative change for rural communities across rural Africa.