Funded

Total loan: $950

Khakakho Group

Bungoma South, Kenya / Farming

A loan helped a member to purchase hybrid seed and fertilizer for the cultivation of maize, millet, and sorghum.

Khakakho Group's story

Roselyne is pictured on the right with her hand raised, amongst her Khakakho Group members. The 15 of them, 12 women and 3 men, are farmers in Bungoma South District. Farming inputs will be delivered to her on credit consisting of the necessary materials to plant ½ acre of maize, millet and sorghum. Roselyne is a new One Acre Fund farmer and is excited about the 2013 Long Rains season. She joined One Acre Fund in order to grow enough food for the family and use increased profits to send her children to school.

Roselyne described her harvest last year as poor. She hopes that as a One Acre Fund farmer she will be able to join the ranks of One Acre Fund farmers that have doubled their harvest in their first year of the program. She plans to use the money that she earns from her next harvest to send her children to school and perhaps invest in another business. For the 2013 Long Rains season, Roselyne's group members will take input loans of ½ acre each. In total, this group will receive input loans for use on 7.5 acres of land.

In this group: Adelide, Beatrice, Benjamin, Evans, Felister, Metrine, Rose, Roselyne, Eunice, Francisca, Margaret, Andrew, Eunice, Beatrice, Pamela

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.