#1676 2006 · One Acre Fund (Andrew Youn) · Agriculture / International Development
One Acre Fund lends farmers a bundle, not money — seed, fertilizer, training and credit
问题
Smallholders needed quality seed, fertilizer, training and credit at once, and solving any one alone left them stuck
背景
Over 50 million families in sub-Saharan Africa earn their living from small farms, producing 80% of the continent's food, yet most remain in a poverty trap: they cannot afford improved seeds and fertilizer without credit, cannot get credit without a harvest to pledge, and cannot produce a surplus harvest without improved inputs and the knowledge to use them. Development programs traditionally addressed one gap at a time — seed subsidies, microcredit, extension training — but solving one bottleneck without the others merely shifted the constraint.
Andrew Youn, a Yale graduate and former management consultant, visited western Kenya in 2005 and observed that a small plot of land with improved seeds and proper fertilizer could triple a family's harvest within one season. He founded One Acre Fund in Bungoma, Kenya, in 2006 with co-founder John Gachunga to deliver everything a farmer needed in a single bundled service.
换别人会怎么做
Run separate programs: a seed subsidy here, a microcredit scheme there, an extension training project over there. Each addresses one constraint but leaves the others binding, so the farmer's overall outcome barely changes and each program blames the others for its limited results.
他们看到了什么
Poverty traps are interlocking constraints: relieve one and the next one still binds. So the product is not seed, or credit, or training — the product is the bundle, delivered together, because any piece alone fails.
那一手
One Acre Fund delivers a complete service bundle — improved seeds, fertilizer on credit, weekly agricultural training, and market facilitation — to village groups through local field officers. Farmers receive inputs on an asset-based loan with crop insurance against drought and disease, and repay in flexible micro-installments during the growing season rather than one lump sum after harvest. Each village group of farmers is coordinated by a field officer who delivers inputs, conducts training sessions, and collects repayments, keeping transaction costs low enough to serve farmers conventional banks and NGOs consider unreachable.
为什么管用
The four inputs — seeds, fertilizer, training, credit — are complements, not substitutes: without credit, farmers cannot buy improved inputs; without inputs, training has nothing to apply to; without training, expensive inputs are wasted through misuse. Delivering them together through village groups coordinated by field officers keeps transaction costs low and creates social pressure for repayment. Flexible micro-installments aligned to the growing season, with crop insurance absorbing weather shocks, keep default rates low because no single drought triggers a cascade of defaults across the whole portfolio.
值了多少
A registered RCT in western Kenya found the bundled program raised maize production about 26% and profits about 16% against a control group.
什么时候会失灵
It fails when growing seasons are too unpredictable for harvest-time repayment — in regions where climate change has made rainfall patterns erratic, the bundle cannot guarantee a harvest large enough to repay. It also fails where population density is too low to make field officer visits economical; the model requires enough farmers per geography to justify the local coordination cost. And it requires that farmers actually have surplus potential — if soil is too degraded or landholdings too small, improved inputs alone cannot generate enough surplus to repay the credit.
后来呢
One Acre Fund won the 2023 Hilton Humanitarian Prize ($2.5 million) and was a 2006 Echoing Green Fellow. The bundled-service model became a reference point in agricultural development, influencing how NGOs and governments structure smallholder support programs across East and West Africa. The model was profiled in Roger Thurow's The Last Hunger Season (2012).
资料来源
- [1]Can Smallholder Extension Transform African Agriculture? (NBER Working Paper 26054)National Bureau of Economic Research, 2021nber.org
- [2]Goldilocks Toolkit: One Acre Fund Case StudyInnovations for Poverty Action, 2016poverty-action.org