Subsistence to Self-Reliance - Bringing the Power of Markets to Africa’s Lowest-Income Farmers

Founded in 2006, One Acre Fund exists to pursue two core passions: 1) serving the world’s lowest-income populations, smallholder farmers, and 2) developing a market-based solution that dignifies them as paying customers rather than aid recipients. Through our comprehensive ‘market in a box,’ we bring the power of markets directly to rural smallholders. We deliver farm inputs on credit, facilitate flexible repayment, conduct weekly in-field farm trainings, provide post-harvest and market support, and extend protective crop insurance. Unlike traditional charities, our solution interacts with farmers as paying customers. This gives them a commanding voice in our program delivery, and enables a long-term sustainable business model. Importantly, our bundled approach delivers powerful, measurable results for our farmers (the majority of whom are women): within one planting season, they increase their farm income by 50% or more, and begin a swift pathway from subsistence to self-reliance. Since inception, One Acre Fund has pursued the steady expansion of our solution, launching full-scale operations in six East African countries: Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Malawi, and Uganda. Yet with 50 million hungry farm households in Sub-Saharan Africa, we remain small against the problem we are trying to solve. Therefore, we are now working to grow as fast as we can, and by the end of 2017, we have an ambitious vision to serve 550,000 farm families, encompassing over two million children. Importantly, as we achieve this new level of growth, the cost-efficiency of our solution will also dramatically increase. We will steadily increase our sustainability (% of costs covered by farmer repayments) through increased economies of scale, requiring only $20 USD in donor subsidy to extend our complete ‘market in a box’ to each rural farm family by the end of 2017. The Dutch Government is serving as an anchor funder to help fuel our growth to this next level of scale and efficiency, providing €4m EUR in program support over two years (2016 and 2017). This support will enable us to also raise an additional €15m EUR in grants for our core program, and to earn an additional €68m EUR in repayments from the farmers we serve. This funding will propel One Acre Fund toward key organizational milestones: in 2017, we plan to serve over half a million farm families, at over 80% financial sustainability. Importantly, this support will place us on a strong trajectory to achieve our 2020 goal: alleviating hunger and poverty for one million farm families.