Building the Movement: One Acre Fund Shares Best Practices, Lessons Learned for Nonprofit Social Enterprises
April 16, 2015
Submitted by One Acre Fund
One Acre Fund considers itself a member of the social entrepreneurship movement. That is, we belong to a category of nonprofit social enterprises whose efforts are guided by entrepreneurial ideals of constant innovation, data-driven impact, scalability, and financial sustainability. Our new online resource library, One Acre Fund Insights, features reports and white papers that highlight our unique approach to social entrepreneurship.
The way we see it, we’re in the business of delivering much-needed services to some of the hardest working people on the planet: smallholder farmers. We’re not interested in maximizing profit. Our goal is simply to make more smallholder farmers more prosperous by giving them access to the financing and training they need to increase farm productivity. On average, One Acre Fund farmers increase their income by 50 percent on every planted acre. For the 200,000 farm families we serve in Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania, our comprehensive service bundle is the difference between hunger and plenty.
While One Acre Fund employs business strategies to help smallholder farmers grow themselves out of poverty, the “social” part of the social entrepreneurship movement means we belong to a community of practitioners who are cooperative instead of competitive. We place a high premium on sharing information and lessons learned.
With the recent launch of One Acre Fund Insights, we’re stepping up our game as innovators and collaborators in the agriculture development space. In our new online resource library, you can find:
- Valuable results from our crop trials, along with reports on our smallholder agroforestry and post-harvest storage programs.
- Detailed information on our unique agriculture microfinance model, including specifics on asset-based lending and flexible repayment strategies.
- Our careful approach to agriculture development policy, including strategies for engaging with local governments and policy processes in East Africa.
- Detailed explanations of One Acre Fund’s emphasis on staff development, scaling innovations, and pursuing financial sustainability.
- White papers that critically examine One Acre Fund projects that have not succeeded.
One Acre Fund Insights is intended to be a community-wide resource that evolves and extends beyond our own work. With this in mind, the library also feature articles and case studies produced by leading agriculture development organizations whose work we admire.
Building a community of practitioners who share best practices and lessons learned allows nonprofit social enterprises to deliver innovative solutions that have real impact on the people we serve. If we don’t share what we know, we run the risk of spinning our wheels, devoting time and resources to ideas that have already been proven ineffective.
We hope our library is a useful resource for development practitioners, and that more organizations will help us build the movement by sharing key insights, best practices, and lessons learned.
Interested in submitting a publication to One Acre Fund Insights? Please email hilda.poulson@oneacrefund.org.
ABOUT ONE ACRE FUND
One Acre Fund is nonprofit social enterprise that provides 200,000 smallholder farmers in East Africa with the financing, seed and fertilizer, training, and market facilitation they need to significantly increase their agriculture productivity and incomes.
