Funded

Total loan: $1,500

Marathon Group

Kabiyet, Kenya / Farming

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

Marathon Group's story

This season is not the first one that Janet has worked alongside One Acre Fund. She has been a member for a few years now, having joined the program in 2017. Although she is the only person featured in the above picture, she is actually representing her group of 11 farmers in Kabiyet Duka Zone District, Kenya. Others in the group were unavailable during profile collections.

Janet is often described by her community as a very hardworking individual. She decided to be the one to represent her group because she wanted to gain leadership skills. Like many of her fellow farmers, Janet decided she wanted to be part of the One Acre Fund community in order to have access to quality training and acquire new farming methods, and hopes to use the profits from this year’s harvest to send her children to school.

This loan will help not only Janet, but the whole group, who will receive maize seeds and fertilizer to plant a total of 8.29 acres of land.

Janet is holding a solar light previously purchased using a Kiva loan.

In this group: Janet, Gladys , Salome , Mary , Monica , Catherine , Eunice , Ezekel , Joan , Faith , Paulina

This loan is special because:

It provides smallholder farmers with seeds and supplies at the planting season.

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.