Funded

Total loan: $400

Edith's Group

Matete, Kenya / Farming

A loan helped a member to gain access to cost-efficient hybrid seeds and fertilizer for maize cultivation.

Edith's Group's story

Pictured above is Edith, often described as an extremely hardworking individual. She is 50 years old and, as a group leader, she is representing her group of 20 farmers in Matete District, Kenya.

Edith is returning this season to work with One Acre Fund again, as this means that she is able to have access to quality training and acquire new farming methods, which is why she decided to join in the first place. Edith says that she is happy to have made that decision because, since she first joined in 2012, she has had a healthier life due to better nutrition, which has improved her day-to-day life significantly. Edith will use the profits from this season to buy a cow.

The group will use this loan to purchase seeds and fertilizer to plant a total of 6.75 acres.

In this group: Edith, Elicah, Henry, Jullita, Pamellah, Dickson, Winny, Everline, Nancey , Carolyne , Christapell, Mourine, Norah , Rose, Lucy , Violet, Lenah, Juma, Elizabeth, 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.