Andrew Youn

2006

Andrew Youn

One Acre Fund

http://www.oneacrefund.org

Bungoma, Kenya

Food, Nutrition, Agriculture

The Bold Idea:

The One Acre Fund hopes to lead a revolution in chronic hunger alleviation in Africa, moving away from stop-gap measures like food aid towards a permanent solution. The vast majority of Africa’s hungry are farmers who grow their own food. Studies have shown that with basic farm tools, these farmers could at least triple their yield within six months. The One Acre Fund will unlock this permanent growth potential for even the poorest of the hungry by providing a comprehensive service bundle: farm inputs on credit, weekly farm education sessions, and access to output markets. In Africa, hunger is the number one contributor to childhood death. The One Acre Fund works with populations in which 15 percent of children die before reaching adulthood and 40 percent are physically stunted from a lifetime of severe hunger. Food means life for their members.

Biography:

Andrew’s passion for this work stems from his lifelong involvement in empowering disadvantaged communities to stand on their own. Andrew graduated from Yale with honors, worked as a management consultant to Fortune 500 companies, and completed his MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in June 2006.

Moment of Obligation: Why did you want to create your new organization?
There was a family in a hut in Kenya that truly taught me what hunger means. I watched as a 14-year-old girl, Josephine, mixed together a handful of flour with a lot of water into a thin mixture, and then boiled it for a long time. Each child had one cup to drink as their meal. I could only think: this must end. It is a moment I will remember forever.

Gall to Think Big: What has given you the ability to take on deeply entrenched social problems?
The level of hunger in East Africa stretches in every direction as far as the eye can see and so it is almost impossible to think small. The instant you feed one person, another one hundred are lined up with their hand stretching out. You quickly realize that handouts won’t solve a thing – unless you’re ready to feed millions of people every year, forever. The only way to make a real difference is to somehow empower the poor to solve their own problems (sustainability), and do this in a way that can impact a lot of people (scalability). There is desperate need for a massive organization that will accomplish this. This is something I can imagine. I used to consult to mega-corporations wielding billions of dollars in revenues and with tens of thousands of employees – any one of these organizations had the magnitude to solve world hunger. Today, it might seem like a pipe dream to grow One Acre Fund to this scale. But, why not?

New and Untested: Describe what’s innovative about your new work.
Conventional wisdom is that the chronically hungry cannot be empowered – they are just “too poor” to take responsibility for themselves. Very few organizations are willing to take these people on as clients, and indeed have no real incentive to – donors rarely understand the different gradations of poverty. Thus, although a lot of organizations talk about “ending hunger,” the chronically hungry are uniformly left behind. One Acre Fund works with the poorest of the poor – the chronically hungry. In addition, we don’t attack their hunger by feeding them directly – we actually believe that these people have the capacity to change their own lives. We bring a comprehensive service bundle to farm families stricken by severe annual hunger, and empower them to permanently increase their own food yields by 400 percent, within six months. We work only with a severely poor population, and empower them to achieve better lives for themselves.

Seeing Possibilities: What do you believe are the most important qualities to do social change work?
I wish there was more of an emphasis on “customer service” in social change. Customer service is such a basic business concept – satisfy your customer or they will leave – but this is often non-existent in the nonprofit sector, where the poor often have no choice but to take what is given to them. This leads to donor-driven strategies for helping the poor, instead of customer-driven strategies for helping the poor help themselves. I believe in the word “service” – we must listen to our clients, and strive to serve them the best we can. The idea for One Acre Fund came completely from ten interviews with poor families in rural Kenya.

Which musical artists/albums get you going?
When I hear our farm families in Kenya sing – it cuts straight to my soul. I am going to be recording some of their songs and hope to share them one day on our website, www.oneacrefund.org. I love the traditional music of ordinary people of any kind, ranging from the American south to the huts of the people I work with in rural Kenya. It’s amazing how the themes are always the same – famine, loss, hope.

What books do you recommend (pleasure, work and anything in between)?
The End of Poverty by Jeff Sachs, How to Change the World by David Bornstein, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World by John Wood, The Shipping News by Annie Proulx, Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy and Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson.

Which websites do you visit often (work and/or personal)?

• oneacrefund.org (a place where you can accomplish social change for a farm family of six, for as little as $20 a month) 

Any last words, thoughts or advice to other social change leaders?
I think Gandhi said it best: “You must be the change that you want to see in the world.”