Producers

Every six months, One Acre Fund pulls together a performance report that provides its donors with an honest view of the organization's progress. Its most recent report, for the six months ending October 2011, discusses the following accomplishments:

• Grew program size from 54,000 farm families to 75,000 farm families, serving more than 300,000 children.
• Had its tenth harvest, increasing take-home farm income by 100% per acre, with 98% of farmers repaying program fees.
• Covered 77% of field costs through farmer repayments, exceeding the 2011 goal of 75%.

The report briefly concludes with One Acre Fund's vision for the future and great enthusiasm to create life change for 180,000 families in the next 24 months.

Download the current and past performance reports at right.

Supported by USAID’s Fostering Agriculture Competitiveness Employing Information Communication Technologies (FACET) project under the FIELD-Support LWA, this profile feautures MarketMaker, a web-based interactive agriculture database and mapping platform. Created in 2004 by the University of Illinois Extension, it has developed into a national partnership between land grant institutions and U.S. state and federal Departments of Agriculture. The profile includes how it works, the implementer/funder, the technology used, fees, primary markets, users, business model, and impact.

The FACET project aims to help USAID missions and their implementing partners in sub-Saharan Africa use information and communications technology in sustainable and scalable approaches to improve the impact of their agriculture related development projects.

Paper presented at the 11th International Annual Conference of the Arab Fertilizer Association, Cairo, Egypt, February 1-3, 2005.

Input voucher programs for fertilizer and improved seed provide a market-friendly means of providing (1) direct subsidies or crop production credit to subsistence farmers, or (2) income transfer that creates linkages between these farmers and private sector input dealers. Vouchers represent a sustainable market development tool or an emergency marketing tool. An integral part of the voucher programs is the provision of technical assistance to both the recipient farmers and the input dealers.

The voucher systems discussed in this paper illustrate the flexibility of this practical policy tool and demonstrate how food security and market development can be linked with benefits for all participants. For donors they provide a means of supporting both poverty alleviation and sustainable market development with an exit strategy. Some details of these programs are discussed in this paper and future developments and refinements are considered.

This guide is designed to help USAID agriculture officers better incorporate gender issues into solicitations and their technical evaluation. It aims to assist in the application of ADS requirements for gender integration into new and existing agricultural programs. 

Production of high valued and niche crops for domestic and export markets can be important sources of income for farmers operating as outgrowers, contract farmers, or as individuals. Commercial agriculture, especially as conducted by smallholders, will require access to a predictable water supply to ensure success, particularly as climate change scenarios predict increased variability in rainfall in many areas of sub-Saharan Africa. Irrigation, either through supplemental or full-scale systems, will be an important component of this success. Smallholders engaged in rainfed agriculture may be able to access irrigation infrastructure through private investment associated with commercial outgrower opportunities. Currently only 6% of cultivated land in sub-Saharan Africa is irrigated (Ngigi 2009, 189).

This factsheet was developed as part of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) Climate-Smart Agriculture Workshop. The workshop focused on approaches for effective program design of climate-smart agriculture in support of both country and regional CAADP investment plans. Climate-smart agriculture incorporates practices that increase productivity, efficiency, resilience, adaptive capacity, and mitigation potential of production systems.

Rainfall variability has adverse impacts on agriculture production. Rainfall variability experienced in sub-Saharan Africa already has detrimental impacts on crop production. Indeed, too much or too little water due to erratic rainfall and insufficient storage capacity wields adverse impacts on food security. Climate change is widely predicted to increase rainfall variability in sub-Saharan Africa, with the effect of increasing droughts and floods. For many millions of smallholder farmers, reliable access to water is the difference between plenty and famine. It is therefore essential to find ways to cope with existing and increasing variability in rainfall, as well as other effects of climate change like changes in temperature patterns.

This factsheet was developed as part of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) Climate-Smart Agriculture Workshop. The workshop focused on approaches for effective program design of climate-smart agriculture in support of both country and regional CAADP investment plans. Climate-smart agriculture incorporates practices that increase productivity, efficiency, resilience, adaptive capacity, and mitigation potential of production systems.