Financial impact and SROI results

Guided by our mission, we use the discipline of a business to deliver cost-effective services to millions of people.

We rigorously measure three core metrics:

1. Scale

We aim to scale because each new client is a farmer who matters. Each year, we ensure more and more families access life-improving farm services.

As a mission-driven organization, we do not make a profit. Instead, we invest all revenue back into the communities we serve.

By 2030, we aim to serve 10 million farmers—fully 10 percent of the families in the world living on $1 a day. In 2025, we served 5.9 million farmers, both directly with a bundle of farm services and indirectly by improving access to farm services in entire regions, typically through partner organizations. Collectively, One Acre Fund farmers create hundreds of millions of dollars in new farm profits each year.

2. Impact

We deliver impact as our bottom line. Farmers invest their hard-earned money with us. We multiply it into more crops in their fields and income in their pockets.

In 2025, we served 2.1 million farmers directly with a full bundle of services. These farmers get quality seed and farm supplies on credit, and hands-on training throughout the year. These farmers earn 40 percent more profit from supported farming activities, on average—a life-improving difference in income—and their families become more food secure. 

In 2025, we also facilitated access to quality farm services for an additional 3.9 million farmers. We improve farm services in an entire region or country, like opening rural shops and distributing trees, often working with governments and private sector partners. This provides a more modest income boost for each farmer, but can reach large numbers of farmers very efficiently.

Finally, we pride ourselves on reaching the most vulnerable populations.  One Acre Fund farmers have an average daily expenditure that is less than half the $2.15 income per person per day threshold for extreme poverty; and our average loan size is roughly four times smaller than that of the average farmer-serving microfinance institution in East Africa.  

Additionally, 50-60% of registered clients (and 55-70% of training attendees) across our operating countries are women; at least 2x the rate of average large-scale agriculture programs in Africa. We achieve these rates by designing our programs with women’s typical educational levels and time availability in mind, and by achieving a balanced workforce by gender.

3. Efficiency (Social Return on Investment)

We spend resources efficiently, putting every dollar towards what’s best for farmers. We always ask ourselves: How can we use our resources to do the most good for farmers?

One Acre Fund finances its operations with a mix of farmer purchases and donor dollars. Farmer purchases cover most of our daily field operations, and donor funds help us grow and innovate. This revenue mix keeps us accountable to farmers and financially stable. For every dollar we spend, we aim to put more income in farmers’ pockets. We call this our "social return on investment” or SROI. 

What exactly does SROI measure? 

Put simply, SROI measures the new farmer profit created for every dollar of donor funding invested. The more efficient we become, the more impact we create with each donor dollar.

In 2025, the farmers that One Acre Fund served directly produced $5.70 in new income and assets for every $1 in donor funds, or an SROI of 5.7, representing strong impact efficiency for the poverty levels of the farm families we reach. 

As we grow, we aim to fund more and more of our operations through farmer purchases, and make each donor dollar go further.

How do we calculate SROI? 

To calculate SROI, we take the total impact of a program in terms of new farmer income generated ($), and then divide it by the donor cost of operating that program ($). On a per-farmer basis, SROI is equivalent to the average incremental profit per farmer divided by the average donor subsidy per farmer. For example, suppose that last year, a country program served 100,000 farmers and generated an estimated $100 of new income per farmer. This resulted in a total impact of $10 million. Against that, suppose One Acre Fund spent $2 million in donor funds to create that impact. The SROI of that program would be $10 million  divided by $2 million, or 5. That means that for every $1 donor dollar invested in that country program, we generated $5 in new farmer income. Or – equivalently, we created $100 of new income impact per farmer and spent $20 in donor funds per farmer to generate that impact: $100/$20, or an SROI of 5. 

How do we use SROI?

SROI is a powerful metric in that it enables us to combine impact and cost, to ultimately show how cost-effectively we’re achieving impact as a whole and within specific areas of  operations. For instance, we aspire to generate at least $4 in incremental profit for farmers for every $1 in donor subsidy spent on our core program, which we believe is strong for the population we serve. 

The biggest use of SROI at One Acre Fund is to inform internal decision-making. As with all donor-supported organizations, we have limited resources and must make decisions as to how we deploy those resources to maximum effect. SROI provides a common metric we can use to analyze performance of our many programs and countries. Of course, SROI should not be the sole criteria for resource allocation decisions. One Acre Fund also considers a number of others, such as need-level, scalability, and non-income impacts, to determine how much to invest across our increasingly diverse portfolio.

What does our overall SROI look like?

Despite material progress in reducing our net cost per farmer, the inherent volatility of agricultural yields and profits due to weather, pests, and price fluctuations has meant that our SROI does fluctuate year to year.  However, over the past five years, we have seen a generally positive trend, with SROI increasing from 3.6 to 6.6  in our core program (and 2.7 to 5.7 all-in), comparing 2021 to 2025. We believe these are strong ratios for an at-scale program serving farmers at the poverty level of our target population.

SROI also varies by country. The table below shows average core program SROI for several of our core countries of operation.

Note: These numbers are 3-year averages from 2023–2025, specifically for our core program.

* _{“Whole program” includes smaller countries of operation and weights each country's SROI by the number of farmers reached.}

** _{The effects of a public farm input subsidy depressed 1AF performance in this market.}

What are our SROI goals?

Looking ahead, while any single-year is difficult to forecast, we do see a strong path to increasing our SROI over time on both a core program and all-in basis, through improvements to both impact and cost. For instance, to increase impact, One Acre Fund is innovating a poultry program in key countries and using the tools of precision agriculture to start making site-specific seed and fertilizer recommendations. On the cost side, One Acre Fund is projecting major efficiencies through technology. For instance, we are continuing to roll out tablets to our front-line field staff in all our countries of operation, to shift core functions like marketing and enrollment from paper; and to supplement training and repayment collection.

As we grow bigger, our aim is to make each dollar go further. In many of our countries, we have already built the systems to serve farmers at scale. We have global teams that can support shared needs, like purchasing farm inputs in bulk. This enables us to increase our impact without increasing costs.

In addition, while we highly value SROI as an important metric, One Acre Fund also generates meaningful impacts beyond financial impact, and therefore not currently captured by SROI. For instance, One Acre Fund builds resilience among our clients, by increasing asset value, asset diversity, insurance coverage, and safety net networks relative to non-One Acre Fund farmers. We are also working to achieve non-financial outcomes for clients, including outcome areas where we have strong evidence today (such as food security) and new areas we see as important to holistic improvements for our clients (such as nutrition, agrobiodiversity, and soil health).