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Funded

Total loan: $2,550

Roselyne's Group

Lugari, Kenya / Farming

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A loan helped a member to support farmers in purchasing hybrid seeds and fertilizer to increase better harvests of maize, millet and sorghum.

Roselyne's Group's story

Roselyne is a member of this group in Lugari District. She is pictured here in a group of four One Acre Fund group leader farmers. The group leaders represent a total of 85 individual One Acre Fund farmers who are not pictured here. Roselyne has been selected to act as the Kiva group representative and is standing on the right with her hand raised. She and the other farmers represented by this group are each receiving one-quarter acre of maize and one-quarter acre of sorghum or millet. Each farmer is receiving an average input loan of 5,349 KES for maize, millet and sorghum cultivation.

Roselyne is 44 years old and has been a farmer for 10 years. Roselyne works as a farmer to provide for her five children. The community and other farmers know Roselyne as friendly, hardworking and reliable. Other than farming, she is also involved in her community in other ways, such as the women's group and prayer group. Roselyne describes her harvest last year as good, but hopes she can have an even better one with the support of One Acre Fund and the other farmers in her group.

Roselyne joined One Acre Fund in 2013, and is now enrolling in the Long Rains 2014 season as a group leader. Roselyne joined One Acre Fund so that she could get fertilizer and hybrid seeds. Roselyne has gotten more involved with One Acre Fund as a group leader and Kiva representative. Working with One Acre Fund has improved Roselyne's life because she is able to feed the family. In the future, Roselyne hopes that her profits from 2014 can be used to send children to school and to buy a cow.

One Acre Fund focuses on working with smallholder farmers across Kenya. The organization pre-purchases seeds and fertilizer when prices are low and passes the cost savings onto the farmers. Roselyne and her 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: Roselyne, James, John, Florence

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.