Quarterly and Final Completion Reports for COMPETE Grants

The reports cover the period from October 1, 2011, to December 31, 2011, and were submitted on January 17, 2012. In Rwanda, One Acre Fund designed trainings for smallholder farmers on post-harvest storage and handling of maize and beans, which will be delivered to at least 18,000 farmers in January. The training aims to address the issue of stocking problems, which has resulted in farmers losing an average of 35% of their harvest. The training will teach farmers to correctly treat and store their beans and maize, ensuring quality is maintained and insecticides are used responsibly. In Kenya, One Acre Fund has been forced to rethink its approach to connecting farmers to traders due to the significant increase in maize prices. The organization will now deliver a new training in February that focuses on three steps: storing maize for longer, knowing maize prices, and aggregating for better prices. The training will provide farmers with information on local and national maize prices and give them a sale contract template to use when selling to traders. The grant activities are achieving project objectives in several ways. Over 43,000 maize storage bags had been delivered to One Acre Fund's districts of operation, along with 7.35 metric tonnes of actellic dust, by the end of 2011. This reflects the success of the training sessions given to farmers, as purchasing maize storage bags and actellic dust was offered once farmers had completed the training. The strong demand for storage bags and actellic dust shows that farmers valued the training they received and believe in the importance of using these tools to store effectively. One Acre Fund has also discovered that farmers like to store on average 55% of their total harvest, with 19% being sold, 18% consumed, and 8% lost or given away. The organization is happy to see an improvement in farmer propensity to store maize for longer in Western Kenya, following the successful COMPETE-funded trainings of July and August 2011 that reached over 25,000 farmers. Enabling long-term storage (up to nine months) improves farmer revenue through maize sold longer after harvest time, when prices peak. In 2012, One Acre Fund will distribute at least 300,000 maize storage bags (90kg) to farmers in Kenya, supported by training and further analysis on the ways in which proper storage influences farmer behavior. The organization has also embarked on a research partnership with Berkeley's Centre of Evaluation for Global Action (CEGA) to study the maize storage intervention and obtain detailed and high-quality data on farmer sales and purchases of maize throughout the year. One Acre Fund's ability to scale to reach as many farmers as possible is a key organizational objective. After a successful 2011, when the organization served a total of 55,000 farmers across Kenya and Rwanda, the enrollment numbers for 2012 will again more than double across the organization. By February this year, One Acre Fund will have expanded to 50,000 farmers in Rwanda and 68,000 in Kenya. Another key objective is the impact the organization has on each farmer served. For 2011, One Acre Fund calculated that the average return on investment for farmers in Rwanda was 130%, while in Kenya it was 100%. The organization hopes to exceed this in 2012. One Acre Fund has not had any cost overruns. The organization has not produced any publications funded by the grant.