Harnessing PaygOps Solutions to Increase One Acre Fund’s Business Value

This report serves as an annex to Episode 2 of the PaygOps x One Acre Fund Series, in order to demonstrate how the renowned agribusiness is leveraging PaygOps to provide a radically improved customer experience for the farmers and how PaygOps is translating quickly into a crucial added value for their business.

1. Executive Summary

2. Background of One Acre Fund Kenya’s former model

3. Materialising a new operating model

4. An almost immediate scale

5. A more resource-efficient organisation

Executive Summary

It’s almost impossible to talk about agriculture asset-based financing in Africa without referring to One Acre Fund. The social enterprise has been around for more than 15 years providing smallholder farmers with a thorough service bundle that includes high-quality agricultural inputs, credit, training and market access, at a scale and rate that no other agrovet in the continent has been able to match. Their impact has been such that, so far, they’re serving 1.5 million smallholder farming families across seven African countries (Kenya, Burundi, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, Malawi, Ethiopia), helping them build what they call “pathways to prosperity”, as they’re committed to helping such families grow out of hunger and become prosperous households.

Although One Acre Fund’s impact is already impressive, the renowned agricultural lender keeps looking for ways to deliver even more impact and offer a more flexible customer experience. They see great value in adopting technology in order to scale their mission and, according to their Digital Innovations Report (2021), the organisation has made a priority to progressively turn from an originally paper-based system (back in 2006) to a fully digitised one. Thus, they intend to reach 10 million farmers by 2030 and understand that the means to achieve such an ambitious goal is: leveraging digital technology.