Grants

In 2018, TED introduced The Audacious Project, an initiative aimed at providing visionary change-makers equipped with ambitious solutions for global challenges the necessary backing to turn their ideas into reality. In 2018 and 2020, this collaborative selected One Acre Fund as an awardee, allowing us to join forces to curb the global-scale challenge of extreme poverty concentrated in rural Africa.

In 2019, One Acre Fund was honored with a grant from The Audacious Project, enabling their mission of empowering millions of African farmers and uplifting both themselves and their communities from poverty.

In 2013, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and One Acre Fund launched a three-year, $11.6 million partnership to leverage our unique operating model and bring innovative agriculture technologies to the doorsteps of rural farm families.

The project brought access to high-impact agriculture technologies to One Acre Fund farm families, and helped create new technology adoption partnerships with African governments to reach country-wide scale. 

The Gates Foundation renewed their support in 2016, with a three-year, $6.3 million partnership to create more tailored agronomic recommendations to boost crop yields, and to test new types of financial services for farmers.

Bezos Earth Fund awarded One Acre Fund a multi year grant in  2022 to work together with AFR100 collaborators One Tree Planted, World Resources Institute, and Realize Impact for restoration in two landscapes, the Greater Rusizi Basin and Great Rift Valley. The Greater Rusizi Basin is part of the larger Congo Basin ecosystem, often referred to as “the lungs of the world,” and the Greater Rift Valley is home to Kenya’s most iconic forests and a breadbasket for the region. These partnerships support small businesses and community projects to restore land, and to deliver trainings, project monitoring and mentoring to help restoration projects scale up.

“These grants are part of the Bezos Earth Fund’s $2 billion commitment to conserve and restore nature because it’s good for people, nature and the planet,” said Lauren Sánchez, Vice Chair of the Bezos Earth Fund. “Locally-led initiatives can help us fight climate change and protect biodiversity globally, and we are proud to work with partners on the ground to advance these efforts.”

“Local groups are central to achieving global restoration goals. By supporting the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative, the Bezos Earth Fund is working to remove three critical barriers to locally led restoration,” said Andrew Steer, President and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund. “First, we must build capacity, drawing on the expertise that exists within African institutions and beyond to help restoration projects scale. Second, we must ensure that finance is intermediated more effectively to reach frontline groups. Finally, we must ensure that best-in-class monitoring systems are used to track progress on the ground.”

Established in 2012, Cartier Philanthropy stands as the charitable extension of Cartier. From its inception, the organization has collaborated with impactful organisations aligned with its core mission, centered around four focal areas, including sustainable livelihoods, ecosystems, women's socio-economic advancement, and more. In 2016, Cartier Philanthropy initiated a collaboration with One Acre Fund in Rwanda, dedicating support to smallholder farmers. Upholding its commitment to these farmers, the foundation now champions the "Improving the Whole Market, Impacting Every Smallholder Farmer" project, a grant spanning from  2023 to 2025.

In early 2017 One Acre Fund was awarded a multi-year grant to support the introduction of nutrition-sensitive components to our work with smallholder farmers.

The partnership aims to drive improvements in dietary diversity and increase consumption of nutritious food products during pregnancy and childhood and improve nutritional status of families including adolescents in the farm families we serve.

Co-Impact announces partnership with One Acre Fund and Landesa to support 3.5 million farm families to generate 20%+ increase in their annual household farm profit by 2025.

In 2022, Co-Impact awarded a grant to One Acre Fund and Landesa, supporting the design of gender-transformative solutions ensuring equitable distribution of land and farm inputs for men and women. This initiative, and in collaboration with the government, will support the implementation of campaigns aimed at shifting social norms and leveling the playing field for women farmers. 

The COmON Foundation is a private, charitable fund, dedicated to the regeneration and re-greening of degraded areas worldwide, empowering communities, optimizing land use and nurturing nature, based on innovative approaches. It is a vital partner of One Acre Fund’s tree planting program in Malawi, Rwanda, and Nigeria.

The Dovetail Impact Foundation invests in organizations that promote human flourishing. For more than a decade, Dovetail Impact Foundation has been a catalytic partner of One Acre Fund’s growth and impact, with support that has ranged from supporting scaling-up One Acre Fund’s Rwanda program to enabling investments in time-limited high-potential projects (such as seed production pilot in Rwanda, and a high-impact COVID Innovation Fund). 

One Acre Fund Wins Draper Richards Grant (2007).

The Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation carefully funds the best early-stage nonprofit organizations. In 2007, they awarded One Acre Fund $100,000 per year for three years.

The rigorous application process involved a panel of twelve top agricultural leaders and references, who all believed in our basic program model of investing in farmers to end poverty. The grant served as a call to action, providing the overhead and capacity for significant program expansion.

One Acre Fund Awarded €1.5 Million Grant to Support Tree Planting Program (2021-2024).

With the support from the Dutch Postcode Lottery, the farmers of the One Acre Fund will be able to plant millions of trees on their land in East Africa over the next 3 years. For small farmers, trees are one of the most effective ways to alleviate poverty and prevent land degradation. Trees counteract erosion of the fields, improve the soil structure and also help to remove CO2 from the air. In addition, small farmers also use the branches for bean cultivation and the leaves as fodder for their livestock. Because the trees are now grown on the farmer's own land, the pressure on the natural environment is reduced. This is important due to the scarcity of trees in the environment.

In combination with so-called 'matching funds', the Lottery's contribution will enable farmers to plant 43 million trees in Rwanda, Malawi and Ethiopia over the next 3 years. In doing so, they contribute to the ambitious goal of One Acre Fund to plant 1 billion trees by 2030, substantially contributing to the regreening of Africa.

The Dutch Postcode Lottery was founded in 1989 to support charities that work towards a fair and green world. Through at least 40 percent of the player’s ticket price, the lottery raises funds to support more than 100 charitable organizations. For more information, visit the Dutch Postcode Lottery website.

Ecosia is a search engine founded in 2009 in Berlin, Germany. It uses profit made from user searches to plant trees around the world. Ecosia has been supporting One Acre Fund’s tree program in Rwanda since 2020, with a strong focus on native tree species, community engagement and digitization.

One Acre Fund’s commitment to assisting farm families in the face of climate challenges has been made a reality through the multifaceted and generous support of the Ezrah Charitable Trust, beginning in 2019. 

Ezrah Charitable Trust has provided key support to One Acre Fund in our effort to become a technology leader in delivering mobile financial services and solutions to Africa’s rural communities; and have also provided crucial programmatic support during COVID, funded new high-impact program innovations, and supported One Acre Fund’s program-wide strategy. 

Focusing Philanthropy (FP) funds points of intervention where the greatest impact is possible by private philanthropists.

One Acre Fund and FP have collaborated to expand One Acre Fund’s impact and reach since 2012.  FP has been a catalytic funder of our organization’s expansion into six of the nine countries in which One Acre Fund now operates, having organized and led a working capital facility that provided the bulk of the working capital needed to finance One Acre Fund’s rapid growth. They are also the tentpole funder of One Acre Fund’s 1 Billion Trees campaign.

One Acre Fund launched a partnership with the Global Innovation Fund in 2017.

The Global Innovation Fund, a non-profit investor that supports scalable, innovative solutions for some of the developing world’s biggest problems, awards One Acre Fund with a four year grant to test "what works" at a local and regional level for Africa's farmers, and scale up successful agricultural interventions within and beyond One Acre Fund's network.

The Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been a strategic long-term partner of One Acre Fund since 2016 and recently extended its support up till 2027 with the aim of making smallholder farming more productive in order to build pathways to prosperity for millions of families in Sub-Saharan Africa. Its flexible, multi-faceted contributions have helped our organization weather significant challenges, including the ongoing pandemic and increased fertilizer prices, while also directly enabling us to grow our core program client base significantly. With support from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, we have advanced our programming from our core program to private-public sector partnerships that help transition clients to higher-value commerercial crops and tailored market access. Its thought-partnership has helped us progress our networking, and develop innovative pilots, ensuring we also extend our services and farm inputs to non-One Acre Fund clients. Most importantly, its generous long-term partnership has resulted in farm families harvesting more food, and having viable agricultural livelihoods for a brighter future.

With support from the Howard Buffett Foundation, One Acre Fund is working with RICA (the Rwanda Institute of Conservation Agriculture) to strengthen the domestic seed sector in Rwanda through the Seed Center of Excellence. This Seed Center will offer business-to-business services to make it easier for Rwanda's seed industry to deliver high-quality seeds to farmers. This will happen in three main ways. First, through a Potato Seed Venture which aims to produce and bring to market 10,000MT of disease-free potato seed. Second, a Multigrain Seed Processing Plant to enable local seed companies to professionally process 4,000MT+ of seed per year. Lastly, through the Seed Innovation Centre, which will train the next generation of 60+ seed professionals and identify the strongest performing existing seed varieties from institutions like RAB, CIMMYT, and CIP.

The IKEA Foundation’s mission is to improve the lives of vulnerable children by enabling their families to create sustainable livelihoods, and fight and cope with climate change. Our organizations have partnered since 2018 to deliver climate-sustainable solutions to over a million smallholder farming families in Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda.

One Acre Fund has been honored to partner with Jasmine Social Investments since 2009, making the New Zealand-based funder one of our longest-standing supporters. Jasmine has been a catalytic partner for One Acre Fund, providing unrestricted annual funding that has helped enable the growth of our program from roughly 12,000 farmers in two countries to over 1.6 million farmers across nine countries as of 2022; simultaneously, Jasmine's support of our innovation and R&D work has continuously allowed us to seize new opportunities for impacting farmers' livelihoods and wellbeing. Jasmine is a founding member of Big Bang Philanthropy, a group of like-minded funders who support scalable anti-poverty social enterprises; their rigorous approach to diligence continues to help strengthen our organizational strategy in emerging program areas.

John Deere Foundation has supported One Acre Fund since 2015 through a shared commitment to support farmers to feed the world's growing population.  One Acre Fund is proud to be John Deere Foundation's leading partner in the company's 2021 commitment to invest $50 million over 10 years to help 15 million farmers unlock their potential. 

King Philanthropies’ mission is to make a meaningful difference in the lives of the world's poorest people by multiplying the impact of high-performing leaders and organizations. For details visit www.kingphilanthropies.org.

Supporting our work Kenya and Uganda since 2015. 

LDS Charities, the humanitarian arm of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, seeks to care for those in greatest need, promote volunteerism, and inspire self-reliance. Alongside their partners, LDS Charities addresses gaps in current solutions and helps people progress toward self-reliance. The organization aids families in creating reliable access to sufficient food through local solutions and resources. LDS Charities has participated in these types of partnerships in over 30 countries since 2006. Together with partners, they are working to help farmer families thrive and escape poverty. LDS Charities has been partnering with One Acre Fund since 2015 and is supporting One Acre Fund's work in Kenya and Uganda. 

The Mastercard Foundation works with and through the private sector, donors, young people, and civil society to create effective systems and infrastructures, supportive policies, and an environment where young people can find work and entrepreneurs and small enterprises can succeed and grow.  

In 2023, MasterCard Foundation and One Acre Fund announced a new partnership to launch a four-year partnership to bolster youth employment across Kenya. The project will  enable young people to develop new economic opportunities rooted in agricultural practices, while improving climate resilience. This  work builds on a 4-year partnership begun in 2013 to expand access to financial services and training for smallholder farmers in Kenya, Rwanda, and Burundi.

1% for the Planet Environmental Partner network

One Acre Fund became a vetted member of the 1% for the Planet network in 2023.

Founding Grant to Permanent Fund (2009)

In 2009, Pershing Square Foundation made the founding grant to start One Acre Fund's Permanent Fund. This fund provides the capital that One Acre Fund uses to make loans to farm families. At the end of every year, this fund is replenished by repayments from those same farmers, and thus can be used to serve more farmers, permanently.

Since then, Pershing Square Foundation has continued to be a generous partner with $20M+ in grants that have enabled One Acre Fund to make a significant upward revision to our projected growth path.

USAID is a key partner to One Acre Fund and has contributed significantly to our current growth and scale. USAID has contributed grant funding of ~$20M to our programs in Kenya, Rwanda, Malawi, Uganda, and Zambia between 2012 to 2023, directly or through sub-grants from Digital Green Foundation, Mercy Corps, AGRA, Palladium, IFDC, and IITA. In addition, USAID helped us professionalize our work in the areas of financial compliance and environmental impact tracking.

Currently, we are a thought partner of USAID’s Space to Place and Accelerated Intervention Delivery Initiative (AID-I) and current recipients of AID-I funding in Zambia and Rwanda. We are regularly exploring ways of deepening our partnership with USAID to help achieve our mutual goals of strengthening food security, climate resilience, and inclusive agricultural systems for some of the most vulnerable smallholder farmers on the planet.

One Acre Fund has been honored to partner with Virgin Unite, the independent non-profit foundation of the Virgin Group, since 2015. Virgin Unite played an instrumental role in One Acre Fund's selection for the first two rounds of awards from the Audacious Project - a bold funding initiative, housed at TED, that provides the resources to allow changemakers tackling the world's greatest problems to dream bigger. Support from Virgin Unite and Audacious has truly transformed One Acre Fund's trajectory of scale and impact, anchoring our path toward our bold 2030 vision of helping 10 million farmers build pathways to prosperity. Virgin's emphasis on environmental sustainability and climate resilience has also played a key role in shaping One Acre Fund's efforts to protect the health of farmers' lands and vital resources.

One Acre Fund Awarded Grants by Whole Planet Foundation

The Whole Planet Foundation is the philanthropic arm of Whole Foods Market, which makes grants to microfinance institutions in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas. Since 2010, the foundation has committed over $3 million to supporting our work with smallholder farmers in Burundi, Rwanda, Kenya, and Tanzania. Their ongoing support enables us to continue expanding services in our countries of operation.