Ending Hunger for Millions of African Smallholder Farmers

By Claire McGuinness @ 2025-11-17T14:22 (+22)

Every dollar donated to One Acre Fund will be matched 1:1 by The Life You Can Save.^[1] To learn more about this ongoing campaign, visit https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/one-acre-fund-match/.  

What is One Acre Fund? Why Support Smallholder Farmers?

According to the World Bank, half of the global extreme poor live in rural sub-Saharan Africa.^[2] In these areas, where farming is the main livelihood, smallholders experience low yields and are exceptionally vulnerable to food insecurity. In fact, agricultural yields in sub-Saharan Africa have stagnated for decades compared to other regions.^[3] 

One Acre Fund is Africa’s largest nonprofit social enterprise dedicated to improving the harvests, incomes, and resilience of smallholder farmers. Our two key levers are our core bundle and partnerships programs. Through our core model, we provide essential services farmers need to increase harvests, including high-quality farm inputs on credit delivered close to home, agricultural training, and market facilitation. We treat farmers as customers, and this core model, validated by rigorous measurement, drives an average 35-40% increase in farmer profits alongside gains in nutrition and soil health.

Through our large-scale operational partnerships, we invest in programs with strong farmer revenue potential. These include agroforestry, market access, and input production. In 2024, we served 5.5 million farmers through our core program and partnerships. One Acre Fund is on track to serve 10 million farmers annually by 2030. 

Why One Acre Fund? Why Now?

As we work towards our 2030 vision, the impact of donor contributions is truly greater than ever before. Reductions in foreign aid mean we aren't able to grow as quickly, and some of our programs have faced budget shortfalls. We are leaning on the private sector and philanthropic community to bridge this gap.

We have proven that every amount helps. Our Social Return on Investment (SROI) metric measures the new farmer profits and assets generated from every $1 invested in our operations. In 2024, for every $1 invested in One Acre Fund, farmers generated $4.43 in new profits and assets. With your support, we’re projecting our org-wide SROI will increase to $9.64 in 2030.
 

Key Areas for Impact

Three areas where we see the most potential for high impact and efficiency are scaling our core model, expanding our tree program, and facilitating improved market access. Further investment will allow us to continue to scale these proven and effective solutions in the face of contracting global support for international development:  

• Scale – A $150 contribution will extend our model (input distribution, training, post harvest market access, etc.) to ten farm families, enabling them to experience greater harvests and increased food security and economic stability. 
   
• Agroforestry Trees – A $1,000 contribution will allow us to support farmers to plant over 4,500 trees. Trees provide farmers with a wide array of benefits, including improved plant and soil health, reduced reliance on a single crop, and serve as long-term asset income for farmers. Fruit and nut trees also improve household nutrition and landscape level biodiversity. 
   
• Market Access — A contribution of $10,000 would allow us to connect over 550 farmers to higher value markets, enabling them to bring their livelihoods to the next level of profitability.

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The Challenge

African smallholder farm families are uniquely vulnerable to food insecurity, with endemically low farm yields and an annual “hunger season” of meal-skipping and substitution. Without access to credit or enough income to spend on modern farming tools and training, these families struggle to break generational cycles of poverty.

Our Approach

The farmers we work with are our clients. Through our core model, we provide them with financing, high-quality farm inputs, on-farm training, and market support. This support enables smallholder farmers to dramatically improve their yields, increasing their income on supported activities by an average of 35-40%. With this income boost, our clients are able to alleviate hunger and extreme poverty, increase their resilience to external shocks, and unlock their full potential — as farmers and as providers for their families.

Each season, across every market we serve, we take a highly systematic approach to delivering life-changing inputs and training to remote farming communities. The robust delivery infrastructure that One Acre Fund has developed over the past 20 years includes:

• Hiring and training full-time Field Officers: One Acre Fund’s core program is delivered by local Field Officers. These are primarily farmers from the communities we serve. They undergo intensive training in pedagogy and project management and receive ongoing training at weekly meetings.
• Community engagement: Before launching operations in any community, Field Officers work to develop close relationships with local village officials, leaders and Government officials at varying levels. They explain the merits of our program, invite visits during key activities in program delivery (e.g., input distribution, field training), and work to resolve any questions or concerns among local authorities.
• Farmer enrollment and Farmer Group formation: Field Officers engage in a farmer enrollment process. This includes marketing our program to prospective farmers and facilitating contract signing. The first stage in our enrollment process is recruiting volunteer Farmer Group Leaders. This is often done by tapping into existing networks of community leaders. Each One Acre Fund Group Leader then mobilizes a group of 8-16 potential clients. After learning the details of the program, Farmer Groups who elect to join One Acre Fund sign a contract, and select their input types and land size.
• Procurement and distribution of farm inputs and other life-improving products: One Acre Fund has strong relationships with manufacturers and input suppliers in Sub-Saharan Africa and globally. We procure thousands of tons of high-quality inputs, store them in dozens of warehouses, then distribute them in 5-10 ton allotments to market points (typically within 1 mile of our clients) where farmers can pick them up. We also have a robust tree program, where we equip farmers to plant trees alongside crops. Planting trees (such as timber, fruit, and nut) diversifies farmers’ incomes – making them better able to withstand financial shocks.
• Provision of loans: Unlike other organizations serving our target population, rather than handouts, we provide the option of purchasing farm inputs and other technologies on credit. This gives our clients a commanding voice in our program delivery and enables our sustainable business model, with the majority of program costs covered through farmer loan repayments. As our clients typically have irregular or low incomes, Field Officers collect loan repayments on a flexible basis up until the season’s deadline (a few weeks after each country’s harvest).
• Training on good agricultural practices (GAP): One Acre Fund Field Officers deliver tailored field-based trainings on a range of improved climate-smart agricultural techniques to boost farmers’ yields and ensure strong impact. In 2026, our Field Officers will conduct ~20 in-field and digital sessions over a typical 10-month season and regularly visit clients’ farms to offer individual guidance on planting practices.
• Post-harvest support and market facilitation: At harvest time, Field Officers train farmers on proper crop storage techniques and how to connect to local markets. Furthermore, through One Acre Fund’s market access program, we promote higher-margin crops and connect farmers to higher-value markets. For example, in Kenya, we aggregate nuts from macadamia farmers, process them, and export containers of bulk nuts. Another aspect of our market access program is equipping farmers with optional add-on products to prevent pest-related post-harvest loss. Such support allows them to store a portion of their harvests and sell several months later during the off-season, when supply is low and prices are high.

Our Impact

We benchmark our success on our ability to make farmers more prosperous. Our approach to monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) incorporates two major measurement strategies. Every year, we rigorously measure our results against a control group in each country of operation. Additionally, we periodically check for bias in these estimates, through highly-rigorous measurement methods:  Randomized Control Trials (RCT), and difference-in-difference (diff-in-diff) estimates. To learn more about our evaluations, visit here. Our projected impact per farmer for 2025 is $125.

One Acre Fund also views impact more broadly, considering factors like food security, asset accumulation, and soil health improvement for farmers. With the improved harvests, farmers are able to end hunger in their homes, and invest profits from surplus sales into education for their children, new businesses, and other productive assets. To learn more about our impact, visit https://oneacrefund.org/our-impact.  

Your investment would enable the hardest working farm families on earth to chart their pathway out of poverty and into prosperity. 

If you have any questions, or would like to learn more about One Acre Fund, reach out to me directly at @claire.mcguinness@oneacrefund.org.

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1. ^{^}

   Every donation matched – dollar for dollar, up to $50,000.

2. ^{^}

   World Bank: The demographic profile of the global poor: Who are the poor and where do they live?, Dec 2024.

3. ^{^}

    Our World In Data: Increasing agricultural productivity across Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most important problems this century, April 2022.