Closing the Hunger Gap for More Smallholder Farmers in Africa
By 2030, the World Bank forecasts that 9 out of 10 of the world’s $1-a-day poor will reside in Sub-Saharan Africa, predominantly in rural places. This incredible demographic concentration of extreme poverty presents a unique impact opportunity for One Acre Fund, as we now have operations in ten countries which collectively hold over two-thirds of the continent’s estimated base of ~50 million smallholder farmers.
Through bottom-up modeling of new territory expansion, increased market penetration, and new partnerships, One Acre Fund established a realistic pathway to reach 10 million farm families by 2030, representing approximately 10% of the planet’s $1-a-day poor.
>> However, we have been forced to slow our growth plan for 2025 due to lack of sufficient funding; in order to continue expanding our program to reach new farming families, we require additional support.
Donate NowThe Challenge
Seventy percent of the world’s poor are rural families who make their living through small-scale farming. They consume nearly everything they grow often with little surplus left over to sell for income. Crop yields are particularly low in Sub-Saharan Africa, and many families face an annual “hunger season,” a period of meal-skipping and substitution before the next harvest. 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
We have pioneered a holistic market bundle of financing, high-quality farm inputs, on-farm training, and market support that enables smallholder clients to dramatically improve their yields, increasing their income on supported activities by an average of 40%+. This income boost enables clients 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.
Continued scaling our our model to additional farmers in 2025 will require:
Hiring and training of local full-time Field Officers: Our core program is delivered by local Field Officers, primarily farmers from the communities we serve. Staff undergo intensive training in pedagogy and project management and receive ongoing training at weekly meetings.
Community engagement: Before launching operations in any community, One Acre Fund’s 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, 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.
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 2025, 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. We also equip 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. Every year, we rigorously measure our results against a control group in each country of operation. On average, farmers working with One Acre Fund increase their incomes on supported activities by roughly 40 percent. In 2023, these farmers realized a nearly 150 percent return on their investment. 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.
Your investment would enable the hardest working farm families on earth to chart their pathway out of poverty and into prosperity.
Donate NowClaire McGuinness
Strategy & Partnerships Manager
Thanks for the post, it seems like you’re doing valuable work!
I’m curious how you’d compare One Acre Fund’s work to the baseline of just directly giving the farmers cash to spend as they see fit? And if you did this, do you expect they would spend it on the kind of things One Acre Fund is providing?
Based on this post, possible arguments I see:
You believe that loans make the approach more efficient as money is often paid back
You can provide expertise and teaching which is hard to purchase, or people may not value correctly
I don’t know anything about One Acre Fund in particular, but it seems plausible to me that a well-run intervention of this sort could potentially beat cash transfers (just as many Givewell-recommended charities do).
Increasing African agricultural productivity has been a big cause area for groups like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for a long time. Hanna Ritchie, of OurWorldInData, explains here why this cause seems so important—it just seems kinda mathematically inevitable that if labor productivity doesn’t improve, these regions will be trapped in poverty forever. (But improving productivity seems really easy—just use fertilizer, use better crop varieties, use better farming methods, etc.) So this seems potentially similar to cash transfers, insofar as if we did cash transfers instead, we’d hope to see people spending a lot of the money on better agricultural inputs!
Notably, people who are into habitat / biodiversity preservation and fighting climate change, really like the positive environmental externalities of improving agricultrual productivity. (The more productive the world’s farmland gets, the less pressure there is to chop into jungle and farm more land.) So if you are really into the environment, maybe those positive eco externalities make a focused intervention like this much more appealing than cash transfers, which are more about the benefits to the direct recipients and local economy.
One could look at this as a kind of less-libertarian, more top-down alternative to cash transfers, which makes it look bad. (Basically—give people the cash, and wouldn’t they end up making these agricultural improvements themselves eventually? Wouldn’t cash outperform, since central planning underperforms?) But you could also look at it as a very pro-libertarian, economic-growth-oriented intervention designed to provide public goods and create stronger markets, which makes it look good. (Hence all the emphasis about educating farmers to store crops and sell when prices are high, or preemptively transporting agricultural inputs around to local villages where they can then be sold. Through this lens I feel like “they’re solving coordination problems and providing important information to farmers. Of course a sufficiently well-run version of this charity has the potential to outperform cash!”) This is basically me rephrasing your second bullet point.
Just a feeling, but I think your first bullet point (loans are more efficient because the money is paid back) wouldn’t obviously make this more efficient than cash transfers? (Maybe you are alluding to this with your use of “you believe”.) Yes, making loans is “cheaper than it first seems” because the money is paid back. But giving cash transfers is also “better than it first seems” because the money (basically stimulus) has a multiplier effect as it percolates throughout the local economy. Whether it’s better for people to buy farming tools with cash they’ve been loaned (and then you get the money back and make more loans to more people who want to buy tools), versus cash they’ve been given (and then the cash percolates around the local economy and again other people make purchases), seems like a complicated macroeconomics question that might vary based on the local unemployment & inflation rate or etc. It’s not clear to me that one strategy is obviously better.
But these are all just thoughts, of course—I too would be curious if One Acre Fund has some real data they can share.
I think she partially replied here:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JvoePwTysZJDvkhEx/how-would-your-project-use-extra-funding-marginal-funding-1?commentId=smtaYauePK63RCsxx