Monitoring & Evaluation

One Acre Fund strongly believes in measuring our exact impact per client served. Although scalability is a key focus for us – "reach a lot of people" – equally important is the depth of our impact per client. We believe that all non-profit organizations should be measuring this carefully.

One Acre Fund currently employs seven full-time monitoring and evaluation (M&E) staff. Every year, our roster database selects a random sample of test and control clients. Test clients are those that have completed a harvest with the One Acre Fund program, while control clients are newly-enrolled One Acre Fund clients that have yet to plant with our program. Therefore, the test and control groups are highly similar. Once clients are selected, our M&E staff visit each of their farms, physically weigh a sample of their harvest, and determine farm income.

This past year, we completed a survey of 300 total test-and-control clients. When comparing test to control farmers, we verified a 102% average gain in profitability on every planted acre (slightly more than double profit). In dollar terms, this was approximately $170 USD per client.