One Acre Fund Nigeria: From Pilot to Full Country Program | One Acre Fund

When we started working in Nigeria in 2018, we served just 150 farmers. That figure grew year on year, and in 2022, we served 24,000 clients across three regions in Niger State: Minna, Mokwa, and Iseyin. We’ve developed, tested, and adapted our approaches over the last 4 years to help us better understand local agricultural challenges and opportunities and figure out how best to support Nigeria’s smallholders. Today, Nigeria is our highest-impact and fastest-growing full-country program – farmers generated an average of $338 in new profits in 2022, more than double our organization-wide average – with incredible room for growth.

Significant livelihood improvements 

Close to 88 million people live in poverty in Nigeria, the majority in rural areas. That’s as many as in Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, and Malawi combined. Smallholders in Nigeria own comparatively large land sizes – 3 to 4 hectares, which is larger than the 1.5 acres (0.6 ha) farmers in most of the other countries we serve. And, while Nigerian smallholders plant a rich mix of crops, they also experience large yield gaps – the difference between what they actually harvest per hectare and what they ideally should be harvesting – for maize and yams. This often affects their incomes and creates high rates of malnutrition (for example, 32% of under-fives experience impaired growth as a result of poor nutrition). There is a real opportunity to generate significant livelihood improvements for millions of smallholders, translating to large-scale community impact.