People and DEI Report 2024
Since 2020, we have invested in advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) across the organization, focusing on building a strong, inclusive team to support our mission. We’ve made significant strides in this time, including restructuring our leadership group, enhancing compensation and redesigning our benefits packages, and improving our performance management processes.
Opening letter from our CEO
Greetings from One Acre Fund,
I’d like to get us started by sharing a staff story. Jeanne Mukarukundo started her career with One Acre Fund in 2016 as a Project Specialist in the Government Extension team. She later grew to lead our grains market access program, pioneering a successful micro-entrepreneur model to connect farmers to better markets. Today, Jeanne is a Program Manager leading our Tree Campaign and Agroforestry program in Rwanda. Together with her team, Jeanne coordinates 2,000 tree nursery entrepreneurs to produce 25M trees per year for nearly 1M farming households. In 2024, we reached 100M trees planted in Rwanda, and Jeanne led our celebrations with the Rwanda government and key partners who helped us achieve the milestone.
When Jeanne is not busy getting trees into the ground, she’s contributing to making One Acre Fund a better place for all of us. During COVID, she volunteered to organize a staff charity drive that contributed to families affected by COVID. She also helped start a staff savings and loan cooperative society – with around $100K capital – currently with 172 members that has become a valuable financial resource for colleagues. To me, Jeanne is a great reminder of the entrepreneurial and social impact spirit with which One Acre Fund was founded. Her journey so far is a great example of someone reaching into her potential in service of our mission, colleagues, and clients. At the end of the day, it’s our people who will ensure we achieve our vision.
Beginning in 2020, we put a spotlight on our commitment to drive better diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) outcomes across the organization, which included setting yearly People and DEI Priorities that encompass major organization-wide change projects, and delivering meaningful wins. In the past four years, we have reconstituted our senior leadership group to be more representative in terms of gender and nationality, redesigned our compensation and benefits strategy (extending four core benefits for all staff), revamped our performance management processes and tools, established an Ombuds office, and improved DEI fluency for office-based and farmer-facing teams.
When we launched our 2030 vision, we committed to serving 10 million farmers, planting 1 billion trees, and generating 1 billion dollars of impact. It is an ambitious goal that will take every one of our 9,200+ team living up to their full potential to get us there. It will also require a sustained commitment to a supportive People strategy for all One Acre Fund staff. As Jeanne’s story demonstrates, she and thousands of other staff drive our mission and the people-centered culture that makes it possible for us to deliver on our promise to farmers.
We have achieved a lot, and also acknowledge that we have reached a point of maturity that requires an evolution in how we pursue our People and DEI goals. For example, at the organization-wide level, we are not seeing major swings in our annual Culture & Inclusion (C&I) survey data which helps us better understand staff members’ experiences. However, when we zoom in, we find areas for further improvement at the team level. We are seeing similar trends when we review other quantitative metrics for DEI, such as diversity, hiring metrics, or retention rates of specific demographic groups, such as gender, nationality, or office compared to farmer-facing staff. For example, in the two teams with the lowest gender diversity, women currently make up 13% and 22% of the team.
In 2025, we will embed our People and DEI commitments into both our annual and team goals to address specific gaps. This integration of DEI work into our business-as-usual goal setting marks the next step in our people journey. While we focus on this integration, we will continue to share org-wide themes in this report. This approach allows teams to more actively shape and invest in the priorities that are the most relevant to them, find ways to support all team members to thrive, and further embed DEI outcomes as a goal that all leaders across the organization are responsible for.
I want to reiterate that achieving our business and people goals depends on how fully the people of One Acre Fund show up each day. Without individuals like Jeanne who are passionate, motivated, and empowered to excel, even the most cutting-edge technologies or brilliant strategies can fall short of achieving their full potential. In short, our vision is only possible if we invest in our people and culture for the long term. This is what we mean when we say, “culture eats strategy for breakfast” – in summary, the efficacy of our strategic planning hinges on ‘our people’.
We look forward to sharing more updates in future reports. Thank you for joining us on this journey.
Eric Pohlman, CEO
The creation of Burundi's DEI Committee provided an environment where staff members can communicate openly and feel heard. Candid discussions between the leadership and staff have ensured a regular flow of feedback, and built a culture of trust and inclusion in tackling the most critical issues impacting staff.
