One Acre Fund Essay

Assignment 4 - One Acre Fund

The Organization and Its Impact

One Acre Fund is a non-profit social enterprise that supplies financing and training to help smallholders grow their way out of hunger and build lasting pathways to prosperity. They measure success by the ability to make more farmers more prosperous, that is to say increased crop yields. One Acre Fund envisions a future in which every farm family has the knowledge and means to achieve large harvests, support healthy families, and cultivate rich soil.

Reporting

SROI

Shareholder accountability

To calculate SROI, we take the total impact of a program in terms of new farmer income generated ($), and then divide it by the donor cost of operating that program ($). On a per-farmer

These lamps cost a lot of money to operate each day and produce poor quality of light. In 2011, One Acre Fund began a series of studies (including two RCTs) to evaluate the household impact of selling solar lamps to farmers. In each study, farmers signed up to buy our lamps, and we randomly selected a control group from those farmers who would be delayed in receiving the light. We then tracked the household energy expenditures daily for the test group and the comparison group. There were striking differences and clear energy cost savings for the solar light owners, as well as a significant increase in child study hours due to higher-quality light.

One Acre Fund is now one of the largest retailers of solar lamps in Africa. In 2014, we distributed over 65,000 solar lights on credit.

Our product studies include a wide variety of experimental methods, but in most cases we randomly assign the product to farmers to rigorously assess the true impact. We have done daily logs of energy expenditure when measuring the impact of solar lamps, A versus B testing on thousands of individual farms to test one planting method versus another, and participatory user testing and human-centered design at the early stages of product formation, among other methods.

Maintain. We use our impact data to maintain operational consistency across all