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Research

One Acre Fund

Todd Manwaring

on Sep 23, 2026

• 10 min read

Our Recommendation

One Acre Fund is a strong, evidence‑oriented agricultural livelihood organization with robust counterfactual measurement of yields, profits, and quality‑of‑life outcomes at meaningful scale. It is the clearest demonstration in our directory of an organization that followed its own causal chain past the point where almost everyone stops. The chain runs: inputs and training, then higher yields, then higher farm profit, then a family that no longer goes hungry. Most agricultural organizations measure the first three links, call the fourth obvious, and move on.

One Acre Fund measures the fourth with the United Nations Food Insecurity Experience Scale against matched neighboring farmers who are not in the program, and reports that its farmers experience 19.2 percent less hunger, that 29 percent fewer go a whole day without food, and that among farmers with five or more years in the program the figure rises to 47 percent. Food security is an ultimate outcome by this framework's own definition, and that is a counterfactual on it. Underneath sits eight rigorous studies on yields, profits, and trees, five of them independently conducted or analyzed, spanning 2009 to 2024.

Two things a donor should weigh alongside the score. The headline claim of 40 to 45 percent more profit is an intermediary outcome, and the organization's own social return on investment figures show how much it varies: from 1.7 in Kenya, where a public fertilizer subsidy depressed performance, to 37.3 in Nigeria. The ultimate outcomes beyond food security remain largely unmeasured: children's health, schooling, housing, and hope are absent, and nutrition is named by the organization as a new area of focus. What earns the full score here is not that One Acre Fund has measured everything. It is that it measured the one ultimate outcome its model most plausibly moves, against a comparison group, and published the limitations of its own evidence.

One Acre Fund's Fierce Certification score is 100/100 points based on our criteria:
✔ Has Ultimate Outcome Goals (20 pts)
✔ Measures Intermediate Outcomes (15 pts)
✔ Measures Ultimate Outcomes (20 pts)
✔ Measures Intermediate and/or Ultimate Counterfactual (20 pts)
✔ Shows Continual Learning & Adaptation (25 pts)

Donate Now! 100% Goes to One Acre Fund

In Sub-Saharan Africa, most people living on $1 a day are farmers. That sentence is the whole problem statement, and it contains the paradox that defines the work: the people who grow food are the people most likely to go hungry.

The mechanism is a set of interlocking failures at planting time. Quality seed and fertilizer are unavailable locally, counterfeit, or sold only in quantities a smallholder cannot afford. The working capital to buy them is needed months before the harvest that would pay for it, and no lender offers a loan that small to a farmer with no collateral. Nobody comes to demonstrate improved practice on that farmer's own soil. The nearest agrodealer is hours away. So yields sit far below what the same land could produce, profits after input costs are negligible, and there is no buffer when drought or armyworm arrives.

The consequence the organization names most directly is the hunger season, the lean months after last year's harvest is finished but before this year's crop is ripe. In One Acre Fund's operating areas, roughly half of farmers face moderate-to-severe hunger and 15 percent face severe hunger. Underneath that sit children under two who do not get the nutrients they need, a productive soil base that erodes each year, women systematically excluded from agricultural credit and training, and a rural poverty that passes intact to the next generation.

The Solution

The core offer. Quality seed and farm supplies on credit, delivered within walking distance. Hands-on agricultural training through the season. Crop insurance. Harvest and market support. Farmers repay from the harvest the inputs made possible.

Three program pillars (What we do). Driving productivity through farm supplies, last-mile delivery, and an innovation function. Building resilience through financing and insurance, tree planting, and training. Strengthening markets by improving farm service access across whole regions, often through governments and private sector partners.

Two delivery modes. In 2025 the organization served 2.1 million farmers directly with the full bundle, and facilitated access for a further 3.8 million indirectly, through rural shops, tree distribution, and partnerships. The organization states plainly that the indirect route provides a more modest income boost per farmer but reaches large numbers very efficiently, which is an honest statement of a trade-off most organizations blur.

The financial model. Farmer purchases cover most daily field operations. Donor funds pay for growth and innovation. The organization measures itself on social return on investment, defined as new farmer profit created per dollar of donor funding, and aspires to at least $4 of incremental farmer profit per $1 of donor subsidy on its core program.

Mapped against a Theory of Change, every component maps to a specific failure point in the Social Problem Section, and the organization has tested the links rather than assuming them: yield, profit, tree survival, and food security each have a measured counterfactual. The weakest link is the one running from food security to broader family wellbeing, which is asserted through the vision statement and not yet measured.

Key Outputs

2025 figures:

5.9 million farming households served across 10 countries, delivering approximately $600 million in impact
2.1 million farmers served directly with the full bundle; 3.8 million reached indirectly through market-strengthening work
Social return on investment of 5.7 all-in and 6.6 on the core program, up from 2.7 and 3.6 respectively in 2021
$124 net present value impact per farmer whole-program against $25 donor subsidy per farmer, on a three-year 2023 to 2025 average
Country-level social return on investment: Nigeria 37.3, Malawi 18.2, Burundi 13.8, Rwanda 9.7, Kenya 1.7
50 to 60 percent of registered clients are women, and 55 to 70 percent of training attendees
Client poverty level: average daily expenditure less than half the $2.15 extreme poverty threshold; average loan size roughly four times smaller than the average farmer-serving microfinance institution in East Africa
Measurement volume: approximately 10,000 physical harvest measurements per year
Stated goal: 10 million farmers by 2030, described as 10 percent of the world's families living on $1 a day

The country table deserves particular attention from a funder. A social return on investment of 1.7 in Kenya against 37.3 in Nigeria is a twenty-two-fold spread, and One Acre Fund publishes it with an explanatory footnote rather than burying it in an average. Few organizations show a donor exactly which of their country programs is the least efficient.

Key Intermediate Outcomes:

This layer is measured more thoroughly than any other organization in our directory, and the architecture is explicitly two-tier.

Routine measurement for breadth. Roughly 10,000 physical harvest measurements a year, comparing enrolled farmers to non-enrolled farmers in the same villages under the same agro-ecological conditions, with propensity score matching to even out observable differences. The stated purpose is to improve impact. The organization gives the example of finding weak bean impact in a particular district and shifting energy to another crop there.

Rigorous evaluation for depth, used explicitly to check the routine measurement for bias as in this chart.

Study	Result	Internal measurement, same period
2023-24 Rwanda agroforestry RCT	13 incremental surviving trees; $15.43 NPV per grevillea	11 trees; $7.53
2020 Kenya trees RCT	7.5 incremental trees; $14.57 NPV	3.7 trees; $5.18
2017 Teso RCT, Kenya	274 kg/acre; 18.5 percent profit	287 kg/acre; 23.5 percent
2014-15 diff-in-diff, Kenya	445 kg/acre maize	476 kg/acre
2014-15 diff-in-diff, Tanzania	490 kg/acre maize	478 kg/acre
2014-15 diff-in-diff, Burundi	56 kg/acre beans	49 kg/acre
2014 Busia RCT, Kenya	31 percent profit	21 percent
2009 Chwele RCT, Kenya	40 percent profit	100 percent

All significant at p<0.01 as originally reported. See the note on the Busia trial below. The point of publishing that second column is to let a reader check whether the organization's routine numbers hold up against experimental ones, and in five of eight cases the internal estimate is equal to or lower than the independent one. In two independent tree trials, Laterite found substantially more impact than One Acre Fund reported itself.

The counterfactual designs are genuinely good. The 2023-24 Rwanda trial randomized sixty cells, giving control cells avocado seedlings as a placebo announced only hours before distribution to preserve comparability. Control farmers planted 0.38 trees on average against 15 for treatment farmers.

And the limitations are published alongside them. The organization warns against putting too much weight on single-year, single-crop, single-location studies. It discloses that the 2017 Teso trial coincided with a Fall Armyworm outbreak and that nearly two-thirds of the control group had previously participated by commuting into neighboring areas. It discloses that the 2014 Busia trial's significance fell from p=0.01 to p=0.09 after cluster bootstrap correction for too few randomization units, and calls the study underpowered. It discloses that the 2009 Chwele trial produced results substantially different from internal measurement that year, 40 percent against 100 percent.

Key Ultimate Outcomes

Food security is measured, and measured against a control group. That single fact is why this organization scores where it does.

Using the eight-question United Nations Food Insecurity Experience Scale, a 2025 comparison of a random sample of One Acre Fund farmers against neighboring, statistically similar non-One Acre Fund farmers found:

19.2 percent less hunger on average across the eight scale questions
29 percent fewer One Acre Fund farmers than control farmers went a whole day without food
47 percent fewer among veteran farmers with at least five years of participation
A statistically and practically significant reduction in reported food insecurity after joining the direct program

The veteran farmer figure is the most interesting number in the evaluation. It suggests a dose-response relationship, which is the pattern you would expect if the program is causing the effect rather than selecting for it, though veteran status is self-selected and the organization does not claim otherwise.

Nutrition is under construction. A 2018 randomized controlled trial assessed an integrated agriculture and nutrition program for households with children aged 6 to 35 months in Western Kenya, and a 2023 study evaluated a behavior change campaign to increase egg consumption among young children in Rwanda. Neither appears in the organization's headline evaluation table, and the organization itself lists nutrition among new outcome areas.

Resilience is claimed but not quantified. The organization states it increases asset value, asset diversity, insurance coverage, and safety net networks relative to non-One Acre Fund farmers, which is a counterfactual framing without a published effect size.

Five ultimate outcomes are entirely unmeasured: household health, children's schooling, housing, the health effects of displaced kerosene use, and hope or agency. The solar lamp trials measured money saved rather than smoke avoided, which is the intermediary version of a health outcome.

Continual Learning & Adaptation

The 2009 trial changed the organization. The Chwele randomized controlled trial found a 40 percent profit improvement against internal measurement showing 100 percent, a discrepancy One Acre Fund publishes and attributes partly to drought and low maize prices. The study also found that some farmers had a negative return on investment from farm inputs, and produced evidence that One Acre Fund was selecting better-off farmers, both of which the organization describes as cause for concern. In response it changed its internal measurement methodology including control selection and cost capture, diversified into other crops and energy products, created an agriculture innovation team, tightened customer screening, added non-customer studies, and launched a crop insurance program. That is a single evaluation reshaping an entire organization, published in full on the organization's own site sixteen years later.

Each study changed the next one. The 2014 Busia trial revealed that randomizing at site level with only six sites severely underpowered the study despite 1,200 individual farmers, a learning the organization states influenced the design of its 2017 trial.

It publishes results that make its internal numbers look conservative and says so. In two Laterite tree trials, independent estimates came in substantially above One Acre Fund's own, and the organization notes this as evidence of the conservatism of its internal approach.

Routine measurement exists to drive operational change. The stated use is district-level and crop-level: weak bean impact in one district leads to a shift toward another crop there.

Evidence shapes the portfolio. Solar lamps were evaluated by randomized controlled trials in 2011 and 2013 before launch. The organization now describes a poultry program in development and precision agriculture producing site-specific seed and fertilizer recommendations, both aimed at the impact side of the social return on investment ratio.

External sharing is a program. Independent evaluators are named and their reports linked. One Acre Fund publishes an interpretation memo alongside each independent report, so a reader can see both the evaluator's finding and the organization's reading of it. It has published methodological work on using social return on investment as a resource allocation tool for other nonprofits.

One Acre Fund

Todd Manwaring

Our Recommendation

The Solution

Key Outputs

Key Intermediate Outcomes:

Key Ultimate Outcomes

Continual Learning & Adaptation

Further Reading

Written by

Todd Manwaring

Our Recommendation

The Social Problem

The Solution

Key Outputs

Key Intermediate Outcomes:

Key Ultimate Outcomes

Continual Learning & Adaptation

Further Reading

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