| Type | Non-profit organization |
|---|---|
| Industry | Economic Development |
| Founded | February 2006 |
| Headquarters | Bungoma, Kenya |
| Key people | Andrew Youn (Founder) |
| Website | www.oneacrefund.org |
One Acre Fund is an organization that aims to help poor East African farmers emerge from persistent poverty and hunger by increasing their farm-based incomes.[1] They do this by introducing more profitable crops and farming techniques to farmers and by providing farming inputs in exchange for a share of future revenues. Unlike most interventions designed to improve farming incomes in poor settings, One Acre Fund facilitates activities and transactions at each level of the farming value chain, from organizing farmer groups to negotiating with export markets. It is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization headquartered in Illinois with operations in Kenya and Rwanda.
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One Acre Fund utilizes a "market bundle" to help subsistence farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa "grow themselves out of poverty."[2] The market bundle is made up of five components. First, One Acre Fund identifies existing local farmer groups with an interest in working together to increase their farming incomes. Second, One Acre Fund provides the farmer groups with agricultural education to improve their farming techniques and knowledge of how to grow more valuable crops. The third component of the market bundle is capital: One Acre Fund distributes planting materials and fertilizers to the farmer groups. Generally, these are farming inputs that these farmers would not use because the up-front investment costs are too high. The fourth component is market facilitation. One Acre Fund provides extensive training and education on post-harvest handling and storage, which allows farmers to sell their surplus crops several months after harvest, when prices are higher. Finally, One Acre Fund offers its farmers crop insurance to mitigate the risks of drought and disease.
The organization was founded by Andrew Youn in 2006. While earning his MBA at the Kellogg School of Management, Andrew visited western Kenya in August 2005 and interviewed subsistence farmers about their quality of life and the challenges they face in providing for their families.[3] Upon returning to Kellogg in the fall, Andrew began designing a business plan to employ a market-based approach to introducing more productive farming techniques to subsistence farmers in East Africa. One Acre Fund launched in February 2006, initially serving 38 farmer families in Bungoma, Kenya. In April 2006, One Acre Fund won the Social Entrepreneurship Track of the Yale 50K Business Plan Competition and the Social E-Challenge of the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES). In May 2006, Andrew received an Echoing Green Fellowship[4], which provided a two-year stipend to pursue One Acre Fund full-time. In 2007, One Acre Fund received a $300,000 grant from the Draper Richards Foundation[5] and a $100,000 grant from Mulago Social Investments.[6]. In 2007, the organization expanded to Rwanda.
One Acre Fund has been spotlighted in BusinessWeek[7][8], Stanford Social Innovation Review[9], The American[10], Glamour Magazine[11], and PBS NewsHour.[12]
Founder Andrew Youn has appeared on NPR, Chicago Public Radio,[13] CBS2 Chicago.[14] He was named by Forbes as one of the top 30 social entrepreneurs in the world.[15]
As of January 2012, One Acre Fund actively served 75,000 farmer families in Kenya, Rwanda, and Burundi with repayment rates (where applicable) of 99%.[16] The average increase in farm incomes is 100% and repayments are covering 80% of field costs for staple crops.