Invest in small-scale farms in sub-Saharan Africa

The 2025 season was a year of steady growth and resilience across our country programs: we served approximately 5.6 million smallholder families and delivered strong income gains despite a challenging external environment. As we transition into 2026, we are pleased to share our final quarterly update for 2025, including preliminary impact and financial estimates. Here are a few highlights:

• Impact and Social Return on Investment (SROI): We measure the new profits generated for farmers for every $1 of donor investment. In 2025, both our core and systems-change platforms delivered stable, modest year-over-year SROI growth. Core impact reached $115-120 in new income and assets per farmer (roughly 35% more income on planted land than non-client farmers), slightly below our internal target but reflecting continued improvement. Results were driven by strong training compliance, increased trees adopted per farmer, and improved rainfall in key markets. Our systems-change platform met its SROI target, continuing to generate strong income gains at scale.

• Scale and Innovation: We served 2 million farm families through our core program in 2025, narrowly missing our target due to enrollment shortfalls in Kenya. This was partially offset by strong, double digit growth in Burundi and Malawi. Additionally, we reached an above-target 3.6 million farmers through our systems-change platform, which continued to scale high-demand partnerships in agroforestry, market access, and input production. We also advanced key innovation priorities to support impact growth and efficiency gains, including the expansion of digital weather advisory services (DWAS) and the successful rollout of our new tech infrastructure, which is expected to drive improvements in farmer impact and efficiency respectively.

• Kenya Program Shift: As the government’s fertilizer subsidy program continues to dampen demand for our traditional bundled input package, we are shifting toward an agribusiness-led model. This approach supports farmers to strengthen profitability in staple crops, trees, and poultry, while progressively transitioning into higher-value cash crops. To support this transition, we are building out post-production capabilities – such as sourcing, aggregation, processing, and export partnerships within cash crop value chains – to ensure farmers can reliably access premium markets and realize higher profits on cash crops.

As always, we welcome any questions or suggestions you may have on this report or our work more broadly. Your continued support enables us to identify, test, and implement innovative and sustainable solutions that have a real-world impact on the smallholders we serve. On behalf of the 5.6 million farm families we served through our core and systems-change platform last year, we remain deeply grateful for your continued support.

• 2025_Q4_One_Acre_Fund_Performance_Report.pdf (PDF)
  

One Acre Fund’s long-term vision is to help bring at least one export crop option to every family we serve. Right now, most smallholder farmers are limited to growing staple crops like maize or beans. With the right support, crops like macadamia, avocado, coffee, and fruits can open up new sources of income. We focus on tree-based crops, because they also are more climate resilient.

Here’s a look inside how it works – through the story of one farmer, one cooperative, and one batch of carefully grown coffee beans. Juliette Muteteri is one of Rwanda’s ~300,000 coffee farmers. She has sold coffee through Dukundekawa Cooperative for over ten years. Each harvest season, Juliette walks tree to tree, hand-picking only the ripest cherries. It’s slow, careful work – essential for producing the speciality coffee Rwanda is known for.

Together in service, – One Acre Fund

• 2025_Q3_Photo_Essay_Update.pdf (PDF)