Invest in small-scale farms in sub-Saharan Africa

One Acre Fund at 20 Years: 

• Scale: Our full-service program is on track to serve approximately 2.3 million farm families in 2026, benefitting over 11 million individuals. This program expansion will be largely driven by increasing sites in our growth countries (Burundi, Nigeria, and Malawi). We are also tracking to serve an additional 4.1 million farm families through our “whole country” programs. Key opportunities include scaling our tree programs in Rwanda, Malawi, and Nigeria. Rwanda’s coffee extension and hybrid seed work will also contribute to this growth.
  
  

• Impact: On average our full-service program increases clients’ profits and assets by 35-40%+ on the activities we support. In 2025, we delivered $119 on average in increased income and assets. While it is too early to forecast 2026 impact, tensions in the Middle East are creating volatility across fertilizer and fuel markets. To continue delivering for our clients, we are prioritizing initiatives like crop diversification, more precise agronomy, and weather-informed guidance.
  
  

• Cost-effectiveness: Social return on investment (SROI) is the amount of new income we generate for every $1 of donor investment in our program. Our ‘all-in’ SROI (counting all organizational costs) was 4.43 in 2024 and 5.69 in 2025. 

Across Our Program:

• Fruit Trees for Nutrition & Income (Malawi): In 2026, we are piloting our “Fruit Trees for Nutrition & Income” program in Malawi. Through this initiative, we aim to reach 1,000 farmers (primarily young mothers) with bundles of seven fruit tree varieties. Increased access to fruits will help reduce seasonal vulnerability to malnutrition. Trees are central to our vision of transforming smallholder farmer resilience. Planted alongside crops, trees reduce erosion, improve soil fertility, and generate additional income through fruit, timber, and firewood.
  
  

• Excellence in Extension (Rwanda): Since 2013, One Acre Fund has partnered with the Rwandan government to provide high quality training services to farmers via the Twigire Muhinzi Program. Extension services drive yield improvement by helping farmers adopt good agricultural practices (e.g., composting, intercropping). Through this program, we have trained over 14,000 extension agents (one per village). In turn, they have trained nearly the entire country’s farmer base (over 2 million farmers). We are now co-developing an Extension Center of Excellence (ECoE) with the Rwandan government. To learn more about our broader extension program, visit

https://oneacrefund.org/articles/how-we-bring-practical-farming-skills-last-mile 

• Insurance (Org-wide): Access to agricultural insurance is crucial to farmer success. By providing a safety net against shocks (e.g., floods, droughts, pests), insurance helps farm families stabilize their agricultural incomes. Historically, One Acre Fund has partnered with insurance brokers, insurance companies, and reinsurers. In 2023, in order to reduce the cost of insurance and return a higher percentage of farmers' premiums as payouts, we launched One Acre Fund Re, our not-for-profit reinsurance facility. Available in Rwanda and Malawi in 2025, it will expand to Kenya, Burundi, and Nigeria in 2026.  To learn more, visit https://oneacrefund.org/features/one-acre-fund-re-safeguarding-smallholder-farmers-face-climate-impacts

Further Reading – From Our Blog:

• 2025 Annual Report – Our 2025 Annual Report is a comprehensive overview of our organization’s performance and impact over the past year. 

• How We Bring Practical Farming Skills to the Last Mile – A further look at how extension services improve farmer productivity.

• Her Farm, Our Future: How Rehema is Growing a Sustainable Tomorrow – A farmer profile highlighting how trees contribute to soil health, diversifying wealth, and overall prosperity. 

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)