One Acre Fund has scaled a farming model in East Africa for hungry families to improve their harvests and pull themselves out of poverty. More than 50 million families in Sub-Saharan Africa are smallholder famers. One Acre Fund provides seed, fertilizer, and support to farmers to help them increase their yields and profits, creating more opportunity for farmers and their families.

In 2008, PSF made a significant investment in One Acre Fund (OAF), which was then a $1 million organization serving 4,000 farmers. Over the past sixteen years, PSF committed 40x its initial support in additional funds to assist One Acre Fund in providing smallholder farmers in East Africa with asset-based financing for farm inputs like seed and fertilizer, agricultural training services, and market facilitation – thereby improving their productivity and increasing their earnings. In more recent years, One Acre Fund has expanded its programming to climate resilience work, which includes a campaign to plant one billion trees across sub-Saharan Africa, establishing a climate risk and resilience reinsurance fund for smallholder farmers, and launching carbon pilots.

During this time, One Acre Fund has grown almost 400-fold, from serving 4,000 to 1,500,000 families (and an additional 3,400,000 unique farmers through partnerships) while generating over $421,000,000 in new profits and assets for farmers in 2023 for sub-Saharan Africa’s most vulnerable communities. By 2030, One Acre Fund aims to serve 10,000,000 farmers, about ten percent of the world’s people living on a dollar a day and has further established itself as one of the best-in-class models for agricultural development and the voice of hard-working smallholder farmers.

One Acre Fund, founded by Andrew Youn, created a relatively simple intervention that serves 4.8 million farmers across nine countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. For every $1 invested, there is a $3.20 social return on investment. One Acre Fund has not only created an organization that transforms lives but has also catalyzed a new generation of social entrepreneurs that are looking to scale their impact in the world.

• Hilton Humanitarian Prize 2023

• The World Food Prize 2015

• Audacious Prize 2018, 2020

• Schwab Foundation – Social Entrepreneur Award 2013

• Skoll 2010

• Echoing Green Fellowship 2006