One Acre Fund is the recipient of the Financial Times Sustainable Banking Award for Achievement in Basic Needs Financing! The Award for Achievement in Basic Needs Financing recognizes groundbreaking transactions, programs, and initiatives that use the power of finance to address the scarcity of essential goods—including food, water, and energy—across society.

One Acre Fund is honored to receive the basic needs financing award, which is a tremendous validation from some of the preeminent thought leaders in the banking world. The FT and IFC awards attracted 156 entries from 110 institutions across 44 countries.

One Acre Fund’s work was also recently featured in a Financial Times article on food and microfinance. The article examines the importance not only of basic financial services for smalllholders, but of risk management tools such as crop insurance. “Linking financial services to access to weather insurance could help, as this will reduce farmers’ risks and at the same time reduce the probability of defaulting on a loan,” says Maximo Torero, the director of the markets, trade, and institutions division at the International Food Policy Research Institute. One Acre Fund bundles crop insurance with all the loans it disburses to farmers. To read more about the innovative weather-indexed crop insurance product we use in Kenya, see this post on the One Acre Fund blog.

Lots of people are talking about One Acre Fund, including:

The Chronicle of Philanthropy

NextBillion

The Kellogg School of Management

One Acre Fund has been shortlisted for the Financial Times Sustainable Banking Awards! We are one of five organizations selected as finalists in the “Achievement in Basic Needs Financing” category. Last year’s winner was Microensure, a fantastic UK-based organization that acts as an intermediary to provide microinsurance products for the poor in Africa and Southeast Asia. The other finalists this year include Acumen Fund, which provides “patient capital” to businesses that serve the bottom of the pyramid, and Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Service, which provides loans for tractors and rural vehicles in India.

This year’s award winners will be announced on June 3 in London. Whether One Acre Fund wins or not, we are thrilled to be honored for our work with smallholder farmers and to be part of such a distinguished group of organizations that are providing services to the underserved at the bottom of the pyramid.

One Acre Fund is honored to announce that we are the recipients of a Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship. This three-year, $765,000 award will allow us to quadruple our program size and serve roughly 100,000 farm families.

“The Skoll Foundation recognizes the best, early-stage organizations in the world. Our team is delighted to be recognized this way. One Acre Fund has the ambition to become the largest and most effective organization serving subsistence farmers in the world, and this is an important milestone on that path,” said founder Andrew Youn.

“Andrew is a tremendous addition to the community of Skoll entrepreneurs and someone who has demonstrated those key characteristics of a successful social entrepreneur: inspiration, creativity, direct action, courage and fortitude,” said Sally Osberg, President and CEO of the Skoll Foundation. “Like all the organizations in our portfolio, One Acre Fund is tackling a complex social problem with a sustainable, scalable solution. We believe their work has the potential for transformational benefit to the area of subsistence farmers, and we’re honored to support their commitment to driving change on this difficult challenge.”

Andrew Youn will accept the award at a special ceremony on April 15 at the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford University. One Acre Fund will participate in the three-day World Forum along with over 800 attendees from the social entrepreneurship community.

The World Bank Institute has created an interactive social network game, EVOKE, for young people–particularly those in Africa–to learn about the world’s most urgent social problems and approaches to solving them. In its food security game, it highlights One Acre Fund’s innovative approach to tackling hunger (we’re the first link in their roundup). One of the game’s participants, Tasneem Alloo, a Zambian university student from Lusaka, has already blogged about One Acre Fund on the EVOKE website. Thanks to the World Bank Institute for spreading the word about One Acre Fund!

In the spring issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, One Acre Fund’s program dashboard is described as “exceptionally functional.” Transparency is one of our core values, and we’re proud to share our progress with everyone who is interested. Feel free to take a look at our most recent program dashboard.

One Acre Fund’s board chair, Matt Forti, will be speaking on a panel at the Harvard Social Enterprise Conference on February 28. If you’re interested in attending, you can register here.