ABSTRACT
One Acre Fund builds highly efficient and effective agricultural input supply chains in East Africa. This case study examines how One Acre Fund adopts and innovates user-centric approaches to research and product development— starting with surveys, but moving rapidly into immediate “market testing” that creates products and services that meet the real needs of smallholder farmers. The organization explores how its own success can be measured by the degree to which it elevates the perspectives of farmers above others. This relates to its motto of “Farmers First,” and it is simply a common-sense approach that sees farmers as the best authorities on technologies or services that purport to help them. One Acre Fund believes that the idea of farmer “perspective” goes well beyond what they literally share via surveys and focus groups. Rather, One Acre is exploring how it is possible to more deeply foster Constituent Voice by making it a part of the organizational culture and structure, through making sure its leadership lives and works alongside farmers. This proximity lets them learn from and with them. By embedding constituent participation and voice into its service delivery and the structure of its field units, by asking for payment from farmers to strengthen the incentives for One Acre Fund to learn from them, and lastly by asking farmers to interactively experience product innovations alongside One Acre Fund, new relationships are forged and mutual accountability structures assured.
One Acre Fund does not only practice Constituent Voice because it is the “right” thing to do. While there is intrinsic good in listening to farmers, true learning is also about driving impact and scale. Deeply embedding farmer 147voice in all of its operations is the major driver of the results achieved, both in terms of helping farmers to improve their productivity and growing to serve a meaningful population of farmers in East Africa.
One Acre Fund is exploring how Constituent Voice can be strengthened when married with other sources of data (quantitative, private sector, etc.), questioning the assumption that they are somehow mutually exclusive. Collective learning is strengthened when farmers take a direct role in service delivery, via their roles as group leaders and group members. Among the most important discoveries is that trust is essential to a collective process of learning, and comes most readily when farmers can easily recognize themselves in the organization’s staff. Lastly, co-creating technologies with constituents starts by talking with them at the outset, but goes well beyond that once experience with a product has been gained and feedback on its use incorporated into next-generation technologies.
