Subsistence-Farmer Focus. While the vast majority of agriculture NGOs focus on cash-crop farmers already connected to markets, we have a laser-focus on the hardest-to-serve, most disconnected rural populations: subsistence farmers who largely grow for their own consumption.

Scalability. Over 13 years, we have grown from 40 farm families in Kenya to 1,010,000 across 7 countries in Africa, with a realistic plan to reach nearly 2 million families (with ~7.5 million children) by 2023. Our footprint allows us to rapidly disseminate innovations over a huge base of Africa’s poorest, ensuring what works in Kenya or Rwanda can generate continent-wide impact.

Market-Based Model. We are a non-profit, yet we operate like a business. Clients pay for the products we provide (with loan repayment rates regularly above 97% and covering ~70% of our field costs), while donors subsidize services such as training that maximize the productivity of these products (covering the remaining 30% of our field costs).

We are implementing the following interventions to slow the spread of COVID-19 among our rural communities while ensuring sustained agricultural production for our one million client families. In particular:

Health: Delivering behavioral norm-setting trainings to all rural staff; COVID-19 health trainings to rural households; establishing rural handwashing stations; and mass distributions of soap.

Food security: Rapidly digitization of our core model to ensure uninterrupted farm productivity, including direct farmer digital services; new mobile money agents to expand digital lending services; and in-person engagement by field officers and group leaders using social distancing norms.

Financial strain: We are exploring mechanisms to forgive farmer loans, or provide flexible deferment; also exploring impactful insurance products to protect farm income during this volatile season.