BUNGOMA, KENYA—Andrew Youn was not happy about the passion fruit. The electric green ovules hung on the vine, each the size of a child’s fist. Not yet ripe, the fruits showed bumps and brown spots, suggesting they hadn’t been properly watered. They grew on vertical vines hanging off a larger stem strung about six feet above the ground. Some of the untrimmed leaves scraped the dirt, forming a staircase for soil-borne diseases. In a greenhouse a few kilometers away, 50,000 small plants awaited grafting and planting.

Youn visited several vineyards on a magnificent day in January, and the problems were always the same. He was good-natured but firm as he explained to farmers, through a translator, the need to trim the vines. One farmer, a woman in a headscarf standing on the red-brown soil, seemed to agree. Youn, a Yale University graduate from Minnesota, wasn’t intimidating. At 29, he’s skinny and wears T-shirts and sandals with socks. But in this corner of western Kenya people listen to him. He’s the guy who’s making them money.

A former consultant, Youn is the founder and head of One Acre Fund, a two-year-old nonprofit which aims to link the poorest farmers—those with one acre of land or less—to commercial markets. The concept of microfinance gained international attention in 2006 when its chief pioneer, Muhammad Yunus, won a Nobel Prize. It is practiced by a diverse group of organizations, ranging from huge banks to small NGOs such as One Acre. Each has its own approach but believes, at bottom, that providing capital to the world’s poorest people will create millions of new entrepreneurs.

A graduate of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, Youn loves data. Moreover, he seems to care deeply about running One Acre with all the discipline and rigor that would go into a Silicon Valley start-up. These traits, quickly apparent during an initial meeting in Nairobi, convinced me to visit One Acre. In Kenya, most international NGOs have their headquarters in Nairobi, where global citizens shop in modern malls and can eat in stylish restaurants. One Acre is based in Bungoma, a small, dilapidated town in western Kenya where it can be closer to the farmers. 

Its work is easy to explain and difficult to implement. First, it groups farmers, mostly women, together and educates them on agricultural techniques. It then provides them with “inputs” like seeds and fertilizer. During the growing season, staff members monitor the crops’ progress; most of the farmers will grow staples like maize, which are more forgiving than passion fruit, though they are less lucrative. Once the harvest is in, One Acre acts as a bulk seller, enabling the crops to reach larger markets and command higher prices than they would if each farmer hauled his own crop to market. In return for this service, One Acre collects a small portion of the profits to help with costs, though it says the returns for farmers, after reimbursement, are still double what they were making before. “We’re adding value to these farmers’ lives and they’re paying for it,” Youn explains. One Acre reports that 97 percent of farmers have made their payments back to the fund.

More conventional microfinance involves lending money to people who then use it to cover the overhead costs of a small business. Because One Acre takes a risk on the farmers’ harvest, Matthew Forti, the organization’s board chair, who works in Boston, describes it as a “microequity organization.” This reflects the confidence that One Acre has in its farmers and its business model. Farmers will return because their previous yields would qualify as “crop failure” in the United States, Youn says. 

Since One Acre started the program, it has enrolled about 2,000 farmers (up from 600 during my January visit) in Kenya and Rwanda. Not a bad beginning, but Youn’s immodest goal is to help millions. He expects One Acre to encompass 30,000 families within three years. Even if it meets this target—and a few outsiders called it very ambitious—the project is still at least a few years away from financial self-sufficiency. Yet thus far it has demonstrated a respectable fundraising capacity, raising more than $500,000 in 2007.

Since One Acre started the program, it has enrolled about 2,000 farmers in Kenya and Rwanda. Not a bad beginning, but Youn’s immodest goal is to help millions.

As peaceful as the orchards seemed, Bungoma was in the midst of a crisis. Western Kenya has seen the fiercest fighting since the country’s disputed presidential election on December 27. Within the region, tens of thousands of people had fled their homes for displaced-person camps. A gas station in town was torched. Several days after I left, police killed at least one person during a protest.

The orchards and fields near Bungoma are dotted with mud huts and groves of banana trees, and the people who live there seemed relatively healthy. Still, it is difficult to overstate the degree of poverty in this area. Families are large—one woman had a passion fruit crop and ten kids to worry about—and there are scant opportunities for work. In Bungoma, a man making bricks or pedaling a “boda-boda” bicycle taxi can expect to earn less than a dollar a day—and to spend it on dinner. The people cannot save money, and even a routine cost, like medicine for a sick relative, can prove a catastrophic expense.

Even for an NGO, One Acre is unusual for working with the poorest people, whose lives are often far more unshakable than people even a little bit better off. One Acre farmers evoke jealousy from neighbors not part of the program. And when the local economy is seen as a zero-sum game—where one person’s gain is everyone else’s loss—rivalries and squabbles can turn nasty, independent of the ethnic strife which has ripped through the area.

Before touring the orchards we attended a meeting for people who hope to become One Acre farmers. Held on benches under a tree, a few cows hung around slurping water out of an enormous tire. About a dozen people arrived. After a song and a prayer, a woman initiated a conversation about what makes a good farmer. People responded with answers like “his own land,” “tools,” and “hard work.” In what Youn called an “aspirational” exercise, someone passed out pens and paper and asked the attendees to draw their dream home. The results were remarkably similar: fenced-in compounds with outdoor latrines and space for crops and livestock. One person labeled his dream home as “permanent house”—a structure of concrete or cinder blocks. To illustrate the usefulness of the tools One Acre provides, a man took a bowl of water and tried to transfer the liquid to another bowl using his hand as a ladle. Using a cup, he was able to move the water back more easily.

A few young Americans and a Spaniard were living at One Acre headquarters. For well-educated college graduates, all-consuming jobs like these, which pay less than manning the counter at Taco Bell but offer meaningful fieldwork, are harder to score than posts at prestigious banks on Wall Street. One staffer told me Youn considered reducing the advertised pay further because he is getting too many strong résumés. Across its operations in Kenya and Rwanda One Acre also employs about 80 local people. 

Youn and his staff live in two attached houses with bedrooms and no-frills common areas. Bookshelves hold stacks of magazines and masterpieces of the backpacker canon like Papillon and Into Thin Air. Internet access depends on plugging a cell phone, called the iPhone, into a laptop and using it as a modem. When I was there the house hadn’t had running water for weeks, and was depending on a well. You get used to bucket baths, they said. One night I got sick and started vomiting, and gained a whole new appreciation for indoor plumbing. At night, someone in the house cooks tasty, nourishing food, and everyone eats together.

What are the prospects of this grand charitable adventure? As with any start-up enterprise, it is difficult to predict One Acre’s prospects. I’ve visited projects initiated by global NGOs that seemed less effective and organized. But anything from political instability to hiring problems to a bad harvest—One Acre is trying to develop a crop insurance program—could present serious obstacles. Though not familiar with One Acre, Patricia Mwangi, a Kenyan with extensive experience in microfinance, wrote in an email, “In Africa as a whole, few have succeeded in working with the very poor or in rural areas, let alone combining those two.”

The type of capitalism One Acre is trying to promote requires constant nurturing as it hires more people and adjusts to new areas where local politics and mores will be different. Youn is smart, determined, and flexible enough to learn from his mistakes—for example, he scrapped a program to grow chili peppers after they proved too hard to pick—but Africa has a long record of thwarting the plans of gifted idealists. When discussing One Acre, Youn’s optimism stems from the changes he has already witnessed. “It’s amazing to see how people shift when they have control over their own lives,” he says.

Alex Halperin is a Phillips Foundation journalism fellow. He blogs at Halperin.wordpress.com.