One Acre Fund: Streamlining Processes to Help Remote Farmers

Across East Africa, One Acre Fund partners with nearly five million smallholder farmers to provide financing, tools, and training that boost yields and fight poverty. As operations expanded across ten countries, each with its own systems and workflows, the organization struggled to turn decentralized, inconsistent data into timely insights.

In Ethiopia alone, tracking 230,000 farmers and managing 20 million seedlings was done with spreadsheets, slowing analysis and customer support. To address these growing pains, One Acre Fund adopted Dataiku, The Universal AI Platform™, to centralize data infrastructure, standardize workflows, and empower local teams to run their own analytics.

Integrating this internal data is actually quite complex because in each country our staff use different tools... However, using a Dataiku API Connect feature, we're able to easily pull data from several sources into our warehouse in Snowflake. Jeremy Osir Senior Strategy & Partnerships Manager, Technology & Data, One Acre Fund

Use Cases: Tackling Critical Agricultural Challenges

One Acre Fund leverages Dataiku to drive critical initiatives across countries — from improving planting timing to expanding credit access. The following use cases illustrate some of the most innovative applications.

Optimizing Planting Times With Personalized Forecasts

One of the most pressing challenges for One Acre Fund’s farmers is timing. Climate change has disrupted traditional rainfall patterns, making it difficult to determine the best moment to plant. If farmers sow too early, they risk germination failure. Too late, and the growing season may end before crops mature.

To help farmers navigate this uncertainty, One Acre Fund built a forecasting model in Dataiku using satellite data, internal field information, and survey responses. The model generated optimal planting windows for each region, and the recommendations were delivered to farmers via a USSD-based chatbot, ensuring access even for those without smartphones.

Expanding Financial Access Through Real-Time Credit Scoring

In Kenya, the team built a real-time credit scoring flow to assess farmers’ eligibility for financing. The system combined OCR, image processing, and machine learning (ML), allowing scanned ID documents to be verified against national databases. Farmers’ purchase histories were factored in, and a credit score was generated on the spot.

These scores were monitored continuously within Dataiku for performance, fairness, and bias, enabling One Acre Fund to offer personalized loan options quickly and confidently, improving access to credit without sacrificing oversight.

Delivering Geospatial Insights for Smarter Field Support

Across other country programs, One Acre Fund introduced new geospatial workflows to support field operations and agronomic interventions. Field officers used KoboToolbox and Commcare to collect GPS coordinates, field boundaries, and demographic data during their visits. These records were integrated into Dataiku and joined with internal payment data.

Through enrichment with satellite layers, including deforestation maps and soil health indicators from Google Earth Engine, the teams gained a deeper understanding of the physical environment each farmer worked in. Visualized via dashboards built in Streamlit, these insights allowed teams to identify regions that needed soil intervention, monitor for fraud using field overlap detection, and improve field officer targeting with precision.

Practitioners: Transforming the Way Teams Work

What began as a data infrastructure problem quickly turned into an opportunity to change how country teams operate. Prior to Dataiku, most staff had no background in data science or engineering, and workflows were often dependent on central teams for validation, quality checks, and reporting. By adopting a low-code platform and investing in just a half-day of training per team, One Acre Fund empowered field teams, finance officers, and program leads to build and manage their own data pipelines.

We’ve really been able to democratize data science at our organization and empower more staff to be able to learn about these tools and use them. Jeremy Osir Senior Strategy & Partnerships Manager, Technology & Data, One Acre Fund

In Ethiopia, data cleanup that used to require seven full-time staff and 65 temporary volunteers is now handled by a single person managing automated workflows. In Zambia, the team achieved a 90% reduction in workforce hours needed for data processing. Teams across the organization now validate their own data in near real time, monitor for inconsistencies, and sync outputs into shared dashboards and repositories. The result is faster decision-making, improved program execution, and less reliance on central analysts.

Infrastructure: Building a Scalable and Integrated Stack

These local transformations are powered by a modern, integrated data stack. At the core is Snowflake as the centralized data warehouse and Dataiku — the engine behind data processing, analysis, ML, and automation. Field data is collected through KoboToolbox and Commcare, enriched with data from MSSQL and national APIs, and validated and updated automatically in Dataiku.

This stack powers a range of tools: a chatbot for personalized planting recommendations, Streamlit dashboards for geospatial insights, and ML models for credit scoring, many of which leverage AutoML capabilities in Dataiku to accelerate development and ensure ongoing performance monitoring. Whether the user is a data scientist or a field officer, the same backbone guarantees data consistency, accuracy, and access.

Benefits and the Road Ahead

The impact has been transformative. 

• In Ethiopia, automating data checks has improved payment timeliness for Tree Nursery Operators, increasing satisfaction and retention. 
• In Zambia, automation has cut workforce hours for data processing by 90%, freeing teams to focus on farmer-facing programs. 
• Across chatbot-enabled planting programs, tailored advice increased income by $10.60 per adopter, equivalent to $5.58 per farm annually based on a 52.6% adoption rate. 
• Independent evaluations show that One Acre Fund farmers increase their profits by 30–40% in just one season compared to their peers.

Today, over 300 active Dataiku users across 22 teams, including agriculture research and supply chain, run country-specific workflows with autonomy and alignment.

Looking ahead to 2030, One Acre Fund aims to serve 10 million farmers and create $1 billion in annual impact. Ongoing projects include virtual assistants for field officer training, automated field delineation using satellite imagery, and new forecasting models powered by earth observation data. The value of this transformation is critical: by reducing manual data work and unifying the operating model, teams can focus their time and expertise on solving challenges, supporting communities, and driving meaningful transformation. This transformation places the organization’s power where it truly belongs, not in administrative overhead, but in the real world, close to farmers and the everyday challenges they face.