The MasterCard Foundation and One Acre Fund, founded by 2006 Fellow Andrew Youn, announced a $10 million partnership that will expand access to financial services and training for smallholder farmers in Kenya, Rwanda, and Burundi. The project will enable 181,000 additional poor farm households to improve their farming techniques, and ultimately double their farm profits on every planted acre, resulting in increased capacity and strengthened systems to serve a greater number of rural smallholder farmers, and employ over 770 additional people as One Acre Fund field staff.  The partnership will also help pioneer a new sector of microfinance, increasing the interest and commitment among microfinance institutions to expand successfully into rural areas.

Founded in 2006, One Acre Fund has designed and proven an innovation that enables Africa’s poorest farm families to grow more food for consumption and sale in local markets. The organization’s model provides farmers with a comprehensive “market bundle” of services delivered to their doorsteps, including high yielding seed and improved fertilizer for staple crop production, financing through in-kind loans, on-farm weekly trainings, and post-harvest assistance through improved storage and market facilitation. One Acre Fund also continuously pilots and tests adaptations to their current model to provide, on credit, additional life-improving products and services to their clients, such as solar lights and tree seedlings.

Watch Once Acre Fund’s Program Model Video above, and learn more about the MasterCard Foundation partnership on their website.