Funded

Total loan: $1,025

Margaret's Group

Mwamba, Kenya / Farming

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

Margaret's Group's story

Again this season, Margaret is working alongside One Acre Fund. She has been a member for a few years now, having joined the program in 2012 and, although she is the only person featured in the above picture,(others in the group were unavailable during profile collections), she is actually representing her group of 8 farmers in Mwamba Duka Zone District, Kenya.

Margaret is often described by her community as a very experienced farmer and decided to represent her group because she wanted to be more active in her community. Like many of her fellow farmers, Margaret decided she wanted to be part of the One Acre Fund community in order to earn enough to send her children to school and hopes to use the profits from this year’s harvest to rent more land to cultivate.

This loan will help Margaret and the whole group, who will receive maize seeds and fertilizer to plant a total of 7.52 acres of land.

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

In this group: Margaret, Franciscah , Rodah , Magdemta , Violet , Margaret , Holly , Victor

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.