Funded

Total loan: $3,775

Elizabeth's Group

Kakamega North, Kenya / Farming

A loan helped a member to buy cost-efficient maize, millet, and sorghum seeds.

Elizabeth's Group's story

Imani Fmrs is a group of seven group leader farmers in Kakamega North District, with Elizabeth selected as the Kiva representative. Elizabeth has volunteered to be the Kiva group representative and she is on the right of the photo, with her hand raised. Farming inputs will be delivered to her and the 61 other individual farmers represented in this group. The credit consists of the necessary materials to plant ¼ acre of maize and ¼ acre of millet or sorghum. The individual farmers are not pictured here, but they will be receiving an average loan of KES 5,349 (shillings).

Elizabeth is 40 years old and has been a farmer for 30 years. She works as a farmer to provide for her four children. The community and other farmers know Elizabeth as friendly, reliable and trustworthy. Other than farming, she is also involved in her community, such as with the prayer group. Elizabeth described her harvest last year as being excellent, but she hopes she can have an even better one with the support of One Acre Fund and the other farmers in her group.

Elizabeth joined One Acre Fund in 2012 and she is now enrolling in the Long Rains 2014 season as a group leader. She joined One Acre Fund, so that she could get the best seed prices and get new farming methods. Because she likes being a leader and an active community member, she wants to help more farmers. Elizabeth has gotten more involved with One Acre Fund as a group leader and as a Kiva representative. Working with One Acre Fund has improved Elizabeth's life because she has more profits from harvest, has more farm training, and she was able to save money and feed the family. In the future, Elizabeth hopes that her profits from 2014 can be used to send her children to school, save for the future, and buy a cow. Elizabeth also joined One Acre Fund because she wants better harvests.

One Acre Fund focuses on working with small-holder farmers across Kenya. The organization pre-purchases seeds and fertilizer when prices are low and passes the cost savings on to the farmers. Elizabeth and the Imani Fmrs Group will use the Kiva loan to cover this initial cost of purchasing the seeds and fertilizer package from One Acre Fund. One Acre Fund continues providing training and support throughout the planting and harvesting season to ensure a good harvest and repayment. With support from One Acre Fund and your loan, these farmers will have a chance at a successful harvest, increased profits, and improved lives.

The field officer is also included in the photo and is standing on the left.

In this group: Elizabeth, Robai, Blasio, Emmily, Edwin, Everline, Jane

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.