With two co-ops at social investing firms under her belt, Rosie Sharp, a senior studying finance and social entrepreneurship with a minor in international affairs had developed a comprehensive understanding of impact investing and rural agriculture. In August 2011, a co-op opportunity with One Acre Fund enabled Sharp to put her knowledge into practice.
Sharp spent four months with One Acre Fund in Kenya, one of the organization’s three locations in East Africa. One Acre Fund seeks to improve the livelihood of rural farmers through providing tools that increase agricultural yields. One Acre Fund’s services are delivered in an innovative and comprehensive bundle that include education on farming techniques, crop insurance, and market facilitation. Sharp asserts that One Acre Fund is such an impactful organization because they “create tools that are efficient, effective, provide good training on those tools, and then following up without fail to get maximum results.”
Sharp’s previous co-op experiences ignited her interest in “the financing side of social enterprise and also in agricultural development.” Sharp worked at Investors Circle, a San Francisco based impact investing firm focused on social and environmental ventures as well as Root Capital, a social investing firm that helps finance small and medium rural enterprises through market solutions. She acquired a co-op position at One Acre Fund through a connection from Root Capital, and was given the opportunity to assist the organization on a wide range of assignments.
One project specific to Kenya that Sharp worked on was the implementation of M-PESA, a widely used mobile banking system in Kenya that will soon be adopted by One Acre Fund field staff as a vehicle for payment collection. “By the time planting season starts this year, field officers will no longer be carrying cash for more than a day and weekly repayment meetings will be completely cashless,” says Sharp.
While in Kenya, Sharp was also responsible for management of the data for One Acre Fund’s maize storage trial, a multi-year study on the consumption and selling patterns of smallholders that provided her with a unique insight into the lives of rural farmers. Sharp observed “because maize makes up the majority of their family’s income for the year, it acts as a bank account for smallholders in Western Kenya.”
Working first hand in rural poverty prompted Sharp to reflect on the dichotomy of rural and urban poverty, something she experience first hand through the Social Enterprise Institute South Africa Field Study. “Rural and urban poverty both come with their own challenges – but in rural areas there is lack of access to anything really – be it technology, health services, market information, but in turn there is the opportunity to grow food for both consumption and income generation,” says Sharp.
Sharp’s experience with One Acre Fund solidified her aspirations to work toward improving rural poverty because of the challenges and potential the sector offers. “I see agriculture as an important solution for relieving poverty, and slowing the migration from rural areas to urban slums, so that is where I see myself focusing career-wise.”
