Pledge by One Acre Fund
One Acre Fund - 1 Billion Trees
Supporting Smallholder African Farmers to Plant 1 Billion TreesSupporting actions: Avoided Deforestation, Nursery Development, Science and Technical Assistance, Conservation Finance,
One Acre Fund supports farmers in indigenous communities in Sub-Saharan Africa to plant trees on their land. Rural farm families need assets to protect against unexpected costs and allow for investments in their future. Tree planting both benefits the environment and acts as a long-term, cashable savings plan for the rural poor. And by improving the profitability of farmers’ existing lands, agroforestry has been empirically shown to reduce deforestation pressure on primary forest.
As of 2022, One Acre Fund has supported the planting of nearly 150 million cumulative trees, helping to restore an estimated 45,000 acres of land with new tree cover. By 2030, we have an ambitious goal of reaching 1 billion trees planted via our farmer networks. This pledge will not be easy to achieve, requiring continued investments in efficient and impactful program design, creative funding mechanisms (like our burgeoning carbon accreditation pilots), and collaboration with communities like 1t.org. One Acre Fund will remain doggedly committed to achieve our bold vision of planting 1 billion trees to enable environmental and economic impact for the rural families we serve.
Pledge Details:
Phase 1: 250 million trees planted by year end 2024, and invest in rigorous R&D and M&E to maximize both the environmental impact and operational efficacy of the work. These trees will be planted by smallholder farmers on their land across 10 Sub-Saharan African countries, allowing those most impacted by climate change to directly accrue the financial and economic benefits of the trees planted. In terms of R&D, One Acre Fund has developed a core organizational competency in developing smallholder-focused innovations; we leverage this strength to systematically optimize our agroforestry programming across different contexts. After identifying promising innovations, One Acre Fund’s field-based research teams undertake rigorous, multi-phased implementation trials to ensure strong impact. This process has allowed One Acre Fund to scale novel approaches for efficient mass seedling production, tree species diversification, accessing carbon certification for additional funding streams and numerous other priorities.
Phase 2: Plant remaining 750 million trees by year end 2030, utilizing sustainable funding sources, environmentally focused program design, and efficient operations to operate at scale. Planting 1 billion trees would offer a strong foundation for landscape impact, generating significant new tree cover and improving the quality of degraded lands by mitigating erosion and improving nutrient cycling. Our agroforestry work also meaningfully supports climate mitigation, sequestering significant carbon. Crucially, we are on track to achieve these outcomes while directly supporting farmers’ livelihoods. Each of the more than 5 million farmers expected to participate in this initiative annually by 2030 will generate an average of nearly $30 in new seasonal income through diverse agroforestry revenue streams, strengthening their household resilience.
Focusing Philanthropy
The Nature Conservancy
Veritree
Carbon Counts
Bezos Earth Fund
Ecosia
Keep a Child Alive
Dutch Postcode Lottery
IKEA Foundation
Local Gov't Partners
TerraCarbon
Co-Benefits:
Biodiversity: Biodiversity is critical to the success of mass tree-planting campaigns. Overplanting a single monoculture weakens the resilience of entire ecosystems and brings new environmental risks (e.g., heightened vulnerability to pests and diseases). In contrast, robust tree biodiversity strengthens local ecosystems, hedging against weather-related and economic shocks, benefiting both farmers and the environment. We are aiming to plant at least 45 tree species through the initiative, roughly half of which are native.
Employment: One Acre Fund works with rural farming communities, many of whom are engaging in their first form of formal employment in their work with our mass tree planting initiative. The tree programming creates employment opportunities; from over 4,000 nursery entrepreneurs who grow seedlings, to rural One Acre Fund staff members who train farmers on planting techniques, to One Acre Fund farmers who sell fruit/nut trees from their planted trees.
Soil Erosion Control: When planted alongside crops, trees help to control erosion. Soil erosion washes away the most fertile topsoil – which takes hundreds of years to develop – and with it, farmers’ investments in fertilizer, compost, manure, and lime. We assess soil erosion using survey data on field management, satellite rainfall data, and soil map data, following a well-established and rigorous methodology called USLE (Universal Soil Loss Equation). As a result, we estimate that farmers in our countries of operation lose 20-30 tons of topsoil (~20-30 cubic meters) per hectare per year. This represents $50-100 USD worth of soil nutrients lost annually. Improving long-term soil quality must begin with preventing this loss and tree-planting is one of the best ways to do so – particularly when trees, shrubs, and grasses are planted as vegetative contours perpendicular to the slopes of fields. At scale, we believe that progressive terracing and contoured border-planting, paired with complementary interventions (e.g., training on low/no-till farming), could potentially reduce erosion rates in our program areas by up to 50% by 2030.
Soil Fertility: Trees also help enrich surrounding soil (e.g., with carbon and nitrogen). .One Acre Fund is increasingly distributing tree species that are specifically intended for use as soil improvers; this effort is being closely supported by our MEL team, which monitors client and control farmers' soils to confirm such benefits. The leaf litter from most tree species is an excellent source of new organic material/nutrients. Trees produce leaves using resources from deep in the soil, far below the topsoil that annual crops access; when leaves fall and decompose, they add organic matter to topsoil via mulching. Additionally, leguminous tree species fix nitrogen from the air in the soil, making it available to other crops. Building up nitrogen stocks up over time is vital for sustainable grain production.
Trees: 1,000,000,000
Ecologically appropriate & climate informed forestry: Our farm-level tree-planting approach unlocks powerful environmental benefits: sequestering carbon, improving soil fertility, and enhancing agrobiodiversity. For example, One Acre Fund now distributes over 45 distinct tree species through our network (roughly half of which are native to the countries we serve), including more than a dozen whose primary use is soil improvement. And by improving the profitability of farmers’ existing lands, agroforestry has been empirically shown to reduce deforestation pressure on primary forest.
Long term stewardship & capacity: One Acre Fund successfully serves some of the planet’s hardest to reach populations through our unparalleled approach to last-mile delivery. Each season, we coordinate logistics across a distinctive purpose-built rural infrastructure to bring impactful products and services, like tree seedlings, directly to the doorsteps of Africa’s poorest rural families. Crucially, we leverage and develop local capacity at every step of our work. In our agroforestry model, most seedlings are sourced from local nursery entrepreneurs that we equip and professionalize; our farmer trainings are administered through a network of over 7,000 local staff, many of whom are farmers themselves; and all tree-planting is undertaken directly by smallholders within their farms and communities.
Community engagement to ensure benefits to all stakeholders: Our deeply embedded community model strengthens local community buy-in to tree planting. In most country contexts, community tree nurseries are located close to the farmers who plant the trees, thereby reducing distribution costs and emissions from delivery vehicles. They also make it easy to tailor the tree varieties to the local growing conditions and farmer preferences. Finally, community nurseries are engines of business capacity building and job creation, a rarity in the rural communities where we operate.
89,000,000