One Acre Fund

Why One Acre Fund?

I was looking through The Life You Can Save specifically for charities that offer more long-term projects - many of the charities we've given to so far offer immediate aid, be it disaster relief, disease prevention, or economic relief - and I felt it was valuable to try and diversify. One Acre Fund stuck out to me in that regard.

Their key mission is to help lower-income African farmers produce more food and make more money. It's estimated that the majority of the global population living on $1 a day are farmers, and they estimate that by 2030, 9 out of 10 of people living on $1 a day will be farmers living in Sub-Saharan Africa. This is precisely the demographic that One Acre Fund are aiming to tackle through a variety of farming production aid (read more below).

It feels a little cliché to use the old 'teach a man to fish' adage, but that's the thinking here.

Where did the money go? 

They help through a number of means, offering: start-up financing, high-quality farming inputs (fertilizers, seeds, pesticides, etc), agricultural training, and market facilitation.

In their 2018 report, they claim that farmers saw an average increase of 50% in farm income, or about US$120 in incremental profit each year. They also experienced significant reductions in rates of household hunger.

In their 2022 report, they say that they served more than 4 million farmers across the programs, about 770,000 more than in 2021. They equipped farmers to achieve $316 million in new profits and assets in 2022, marking over $1 billion in cumulative farmer impact generated since their founding in 2006.

There's more work they do in pushing sustainable farming practises and providing high-skilled work for African nationals, but if you'd like to read about those you can see them on the TLYCS website here or in the One Acre Fund annual report here.

Amount Given

£278.40 was the initial donation made to One Acre Fund. For more information, feel free to reach out to.