Funded

Total loan: $300

Catherine's Group

Kakamega North, Kenya / Farming

A loan helped a member to purchase hybrid seeds and fertilizer to improve harvests of maize.

Catherine's Group's story

Catherine is 58 years old and has three children. She has been a farmer for more than 20 years and is always said to be a very hardworking individual. Even though Catherine is the only one featured in the above picture, she is actually representing her group formed by fvie farmers in Kakamega B (North) District, Kenya.

Catherine started working alongside One Acre Fund a few years ago in 2013, and decided to do so because she wanted to have access to quality training and acquire new farming methods. Since then, she has seen her life improve; especially in the sense that she has been able to consistently feed her family ever since. This year she decided to represent her group because she was just proposed by the team.

Catherine’s Group will receive farming inputs to plant a total of 3.5 acres of land. Additionally, some of the farmers in the group will be purchasing a solar light so, with this loan, the group will also receive a total of five solar lights.

In this group: Catherine, Lorna, Jescah , Daudi , Esther

This loan is special because:

It supports smallholder farmers to purchase seeds and solar lanterns.

More about this loan

This loan is part of One Acre Fund's integrated agricultural package, which provides groups of smallholder farmers with seeds and fertilizers on credit, onsite agricultural training, and insurance options. Borrowers also have the option to purchase solar lanterns as part of the loan package.

To give borrowers more flexibility, One Acre Fund permits them to switch groups, drop out of the program and change their loan amounts before receiving their inputs. To accommodate this, Kiva allows One Acre Fund to post loans for groups that may change in size and membership. Only the group leader is featured in the photo, representing the loans for each of his or her individual group members.

If a lender makes a loan to group containing a borrower that drops out, the lender will receive the full loan amount for that borrower back at the end of the harvest season. If the lender makes a loan to a group containing a borrower that decides to take a smaller loan amount after the loan is funded, the lender will receive the repayments from the smaller loan amount plus the full difference between the two loan amounts at the end of the harvest season.

This Kiva loan will be used to provide borrowers with needed goods or services, as opposed to cash or financial credit.

About One Acre Fund:

With this loan, One Acre Fund will purchase fertilizer, seeds, and other important farming inputs to distribute to this farmer group during Kenya's next planting season in February. This distribution of farming inputs is part of One Acre Fund's integrated agriculture package, which includes training, reliable input supply (such as fertilizer and seeds), credit and insurance. Clients enroll between July and October for the following planting season, which begins in February. By purchasing inputs during these months, One Acre Fund is able to take advantage of the historically low farm input prices during this time of year in Kenya.

Members of One Acre Fund form groups in which each borrower guarantees the loans of all other borrowers in the group. One Acre Fund differs from a traditional microfinance institution, however, by allowing groups to split before the delivery of inputs at planting time. If a group were to split, each of the two new groups would have fewer members that could support a delinquency or default from a member. This may represent a different risk than that for a traditional MFI?s group loan.