FAQ
What is One Acre Fund’s mission?
Why did you choose to target hunger?
Aren't other organizations already doing this?
Why East Africa? Why not the U.S.?
Why hunger? Why not HIV, malaria, TB, etc?
What is the biggest risk? How will you overcome it?
Why does it cost so little ($120) to start a family on the program?
What do you anticipate the default rate of loans to be? What if a farmer defaults?
Which agencies is One Acre Fund accredited or recognized by?
What kind of seed do you use and where do you get it from?
What is One Acre Fund’s mission?
Our mission is to empower chronically hungry farm families in East Africa to permanently lift themselves out of hunger and poverty. Our strategy is to provide a comprehensive investment package of high-quality seed and fertilizer, education courses, and access to output markets. Our method is to work through women’s self-help groups in rural villages to deliberately reach the most severely hunger-affected. Our measurable impact is fewer child deaths, lower child stunting rates, dramatically increased farm incomes, and permanent empowerment of the needy.
Why did you choose to target hunger?
OAF attacks the number one health problem in Africa, which is lack of food. Hunger is the number one reason that one in six of our children die before age five, and the number one reason that nearly half of the remaining children are physically stunted.
Human impact is the main reason we exist. Food absolutely means life for our families, creating a visible and lasting impact on child health and development. Our farmers, who used to go hungry for 2-6 months per year, will be able to feed themselves all year. Moreover, they have created a permanent path to steadily improve their standard of living.
Nearly 80% of the world's hungry are farmers and therefore have the means to literally grow their way out of poverty if crop yields could be improved.
Aren't other organizations already doing this?
We genuinely reach the poorest of the poor – women-headed households with 0 - 3 acres of land. There are no other organizations we know of working with this specific target demographic; existing organizations focus mostly on male-headed households with more than 5 acres of land. As a result, there remains a swath of approximately 30 million farm households in East Africa still farming under a Bronze Age system, left behind by existing solutions.
In addition, farming is a series of activities - organizing for scale, extension of credit, purchase of inputs, education, and then sale of outputs - and individual solutions for all of these activities already exist in abundance in East Africa. The problems, we’ve found, are that:
- These individual solutions are not accessible by the poorest of the poor (for example, seed and fertilizer providers are not willing to micro-distribute very small packs of inputs, output buyers aren’t willing to deal with very small harvests, etc.)
- These individual solutions are not valuable unless they are bundled together (for example, the type of education offered by existing organizations presumes that farmers have a base level of equipment that the poorest of the poor do not have)
- The result is that the extreme poor are stuck in a vicious cycle of using terribly poor seed and no fertilizer, not knowing which crops to plant or how to properly grow them, and then having to consume everything that’s grown.
Why East Africa? Why not the U.S.?
East Africa has a rampant hunger problem (one-third of the population is malnourished). 75% of East Africans are farmers, and they are capable of growing 400% more food within six months – an opportunity unparalleled in U.S.
The U.S. undoubtedly has hunger problems, but has significant safety nets – food stamps, WIC, private food pantries and soup kitchens. East Africa has none of these options. The kind of hunger experienced there was eradicated a long time ago in the US – this is the kind of hunger that leads to severe child stunting, wasting, and even death.
Why hunger? Why not HIV, malaria, TB, etc?
Hunger is the number one contributor to child death, more than any single disease condition (Lancet 2001). It weakens the immune system, making a child vulnerable to many different infections. It also casts a further disease burden by creating massive prevalence of physical and mental stunting among malnourished children.
Organizations that tackle other problems, such as HIV/AIDS, often discover that hunger and malnutrition sap the effectiveness of their treatments.
What is the biggest risk? How will you overcome it?
Client culture. We are overcoming generations of behavior. Members are reluctant to try new things or to work hard with no promised return. Over time, we are finding this challenge easier to overcome as we have visual proof of an increased harvest.
In addition, we focus on ensuring only the most committed clients are part of the program by conducting screening through our field officers.
- Contract Enforcement: Payment is in crop, not dollars; as such there is a cultural incentive (shame) and group incentive (like microfinance) to repay. We utilize repeated interaction (won't get future investments) and repossess inputs, if needed.
- Price and Market Risk: Our current crops can be grown with thousands of farmers before affecting local market prices and we are trialing new crops that literally have limitless markets. We select crops that have a stable price history and have local/regional/export outlets. Finally, we are very conservative in our budget estimations.
- Horticulture and Weather Risk: We work with a variety of horticulture experts/advisors; in addition, the Western Highlands region has had consistent rainfall for the last twenty years.
- Political Risk:
- Staff member corruption: only manager-level employees have access to funds. We rely on strong personal referrals for hiring. The majority of our funds are maintained in the US and 80% of our costs are fulfilled directly with vendors or go to staff payroll (highly predictable and auditable payments).
- Local government corruption: The local ministers of agriculture where we work are active advisors to the program and we have a good relationship with all important district-level government actors and a sitting member of parliament.
- Total compliance with letter of the law: OAF is advised by Kaplan and Stratton, the most prominent law firm in Kenya. This makes us less prone to bribe requests.
- Partner Risk: We invest in consultants who have been historically successful at designing stable, lasting partner agreements.
We actively address the following types of risk:
Our members live in hand-constructed mud huts, with no electricity, phone or water. They eat maize for every meal, and vegetables when they have them. They are subsistence farmers. They are dependent on however much they are able to grow, which is about 20% of the yield potential of a decently-equipped farm.
They have a 10% under-2 child death rate and a 40% stunting rate (height-for-age in the bottom 2% of the international height distribution). They have an average of about one acre of land. (The Kenyan and Rwandan governments undertook land redistributions in the last few decades, so nearly all of our farmers own the land they farm, although some lease additional acreage from large land-owners).
They subsist on 5 - 10 cents of farming income per capita per day and 5 - 20 cents of non-farming income per capita per day, well below the $1 a day threshold that is considered extreme poverty.
Our field officers are instructed to enroll families with children.
Why does it cost so little ($120) to start a family on the program?
$120 goes a really long way in East Africa. For example, we’re able to hire our field officers (who deliver our education sessions) at $4 per (working) day. Within 3 years, less money is required per family on the program as we phase out our education services and act as only the purchaser of inputs and seller of outputs.
What do you anticipate the default rate of loans to be? What if a farmer defaults?
Because we are engaged with the farmer at both the first and last steps of the value chain, we create an unusually deep information and customer relationship with the farmer that can extend into relatively low-risk finance, thus significantly decreasing the chance of default. Should any member default, he/she will be removed from the program.
We believe it is critical that we remain 100% accountable to both our biggest donors and our littlest children, measured by hard operational metrics that are reported, good and bad, to stakeholders.
We produce a 6 month report that focuses on specifically measuring our performance on Scalability, Impact, and Financial Return / Sustainability. Example metrics include the number of families reached, repayment rate, pre- and post- OAF child physical stunting rate, etc. Our metrics are also tracked on our program dashboard.
We are hiring country staff specifically to focus on monitoring and evaluation (M&E), we have developed a robust database to capture our program data and store it to allow for long-term trend comparisons, and we are in the process of working on an M&E benchmarking study to allow for comparison with other NGOs.
We also produce monthly profiles that document our impact to one family at a very personal level.
Which agencies is One Acre Fund accredited or recognized by?
One Acre Fund is recognized as a 501(c)(3) by the IRS and by relevant state agencies, and is accredited by the BBB.
What kind of seed do you use and where do you get it seed from?
Our seeds are natural hybrids (i.e., from natural cross-pollination) that we get from a variety of suppliers. Hybrid seeds are needed for strong crop growth in our program areas. Our hybrid seed is professionally-grown in country, commercially graded, quality-controlled, and selected for desirable properties, all of which are necessary to achieve the level of crop growth necessary for our farmers to feed themselves. We do NOT use genetically-modified seed (which is outlawed in our countries of operation).
We use mostly nitrogen-based fertilizer rather than organic. We do this because our families unfortunately depend on crop yields higher than what we have found to be achievable solely with organic farming, in our program areas.
We are able to mitigate most of the negative environmental effects by hand-delivering fertilizer to each plant, and we do conduct organic manure training with our farmers where possible. As far as nitrogen-based fertilizer is concerned, runoff is minimal because fertilizer is hand-delivered, and better root development itself reduces topsoil erosion, a serious problem in our program areas.
Our program areas have 2 crop growing seasons each year, and we generally rotate crops between the seasons to avoid the problems that monoculture causes. So, for example, in the "long rains" season we'll grow a staple crop such as maize, and in the "short rains" season we'll grow a rotation of beans.
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