Funded

Total loan: $150

Zaitun's Group

Lugari, Kenya / Farming

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

Zaitun's Group's story

Pictured above is Zaitun, often described as an extremely experienced farmer. She is 56 years old and, as a group leader, she is representing her group of five farmers in Lugari District, Kenya.

Zaitun is returning this season to work with One Acre Fund again, as this means that she is able to have access to quality training and acquire new farming methods, which is why she decided to join in the first place. Zaitun says that she is happy to have made that decision because, since she first joined in 2013, she has had more profits from each harvest, which has improved her day-to-day life significantly. Zaitun will use the profits from this season to send her children to school.

The group will use this loan to purchase seeds and fertilizer to plant a total of 4.75 acres.

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

In this group: Zaitun, Fatuma, Iryn, Elizabeth, Edwine

This loan is special because:

It supports smallholder farmers to purchase seeds and solar lanterns.

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:

One Acre Fund is an agricultural service provider that supports Africa's smallholder farmers to build resilient communities. More than 50 million families in Sub-Saharan Africa earn a living from small farms, which produce 80 percent of the continent’s food. But harvests still lag far behind the rest of the world. One Acre Fund supplies the financing and training these farmers need to grow their way out of hunger and build lasting pathways to prosperity.