Sowing the seeds of improved food security.

HQ Location: Kenya

After having served as a strategic consultant to Fortune 500 companies, Andrew Youn decided to spend the summer before his second year of MBA studies as an intern in Kenya learning about the root causes of rural poverty and chronic hunger. The experience proved to be transformative. A year later, in 2006, he founded One Acre Fund as a means to improve livelihoods amongst subsistence farmers using market-based methods as an alternative to traditional food aid. From this innovative idea, the organization has expanded to serve over 130,000 farming families in Kenya, Rwanda and Burundi.

At the core of the One Acre Fund program is a ‘market bundle’ of services – including seed and fertilizer, financing, education and market facilitation – that enables farmers to double their income per planted acre in one year. Committed to data-driven program development and donor accountability, the organization has also pioneered a rigorous system of internal and external performance monitoring used to ensure increased scale is not pursued at the cost of quality of impact and sustainability.

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Photo © One Acre Fund