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 more than sixty 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 year, we will complete a survey of more than 2,000 total test clients and 500 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). This will be approximately $100-120 USD per client in 2011.

Updated: December 6, 2011