One Acre Fund and Essmart are joining forces to increase access to essential agricultural products for rural farmers in North India. After One Acre Fund successfully incubated a direct service pilot in Bihar state for the last three years, Essmart is absorbing One Acre Fund’s operations alongside investment and support from One Acre Fund to scale the pilot.
One Acre Fund believes that the most viable pathway to impact and scale is to partner with a like-minded organization and guide its growth for the first 12 months. Combining Essmart’s successful shop-focused last mile delivery services with One Acre Fund’s deep agricultural services understanding unlocks a new phase of growth for both organizations. “Combining Essmart’s demonstrated track record for scale and financial sustainability via rural retail, with One Acre Fund’s high-touch, impactful, direct service model will hopefully unlock an accelerated pathway to impact for smallholders in Bihar and beyond,” says Shubhra Kumar, Program Director at One Acre Fund.
Combining Essmart’s demonstrated track record for scale and financial sustainability via rural retail, with One Acre Fund’s high-touch, impactful, direct service model will hopefully unlock an accelerated pathway to impact for smallholders in Bihar and beyond.
Shubhra Kumar, Program Director, One Acre Fund
For Essmart, the investment and support from One Acre Fund is a unique opportunity to expand through strategic partnerships and deepen their focus on serving rural end customers, the majority of whom are small-scale farmers. “Currently 70% of the products we move are in the agricultural sector that increase farmer efficiency and productivity. Working with One Acre Fund provides an exciting opportunity for us to deepen our focus on agriculture by adding agri-inputs to our catalogue and strengthening our direct farmer impact,” says Prashanth Venkataramana, CEO and Co-Founder of Essmart.
The farmer experience will be similar to the experience with One Acre Fund, with Field Officers serving groups of rural farmers. But with Essmart’s shop network, these Field Officers can now leverage rural shops for input delivery, farmer training, and more. Both organizations believe that this will both enable Essmart’s shops to increase their customer base and enable Field Officers to increase their efficiency by serving more farmers. Field officers will be able to direct farmers to one or more Essmart shops, where farmers can also access additional livelihood products from Essmart’s catalogue of life-improving technologies.
Partnerships like this are unique in the social enterprise world. We are extremely excited to be paving the way for impact-driven organizations to come together, invest in each other, and pilot models that are greater than the sum of its parts.
Jackie Stenson, Executive Chair, Essmart
This partnership will leverage the unique core competencies of both organizations to deliver impact to thousands of smallholder farmers over the next few years. To this end, the pilot seeks to build a proof of concept for a shop-enabled farmer model: demonstrating that we can increase the income for rural farmers by bringing access to high quality inputs and training to every village via local shops. “Partnerships like this are unique in the social enterprise world,” says Jackie Stenson, Co-Founder and Executive Chair of Essmart. “We are extremely excited to be paving the way for impact-driven organizations to come together, invest in each other, and pilot models that are greater than the sum of its parts.”
