CASE STUDY – One Acre Fund
Growing farming across Kenya.
Developing a new expanded programme for One Acre Fund to scale across multiple regions in Kenya while growing their product and service offerings to farmers.
One Acre Fund has been working in East Africa for over 15 years, supporting small-holder farmers with financial and educational services across six countries within the region. They provide farmers with what they need to grow more food and make a sustainable living for themselves.
Recent efforts have seen the Kenya programme develop even further and expand through a growing customer base, new partnerships, diversified product offerings, improved retail and digital channels and more financing options.
An Immersive Approach
Design Research
Field research does not get more literal than this 😉 In order to understand how the improved One Acre Fund (OAF) programme can better serve the local farmers, we travelled to Kakamega to get a first-hand look at the team at work, helping the farmers navigate their various day-to-day challenges. We employed Human Centred Design tools to learn more about their operations and conducted several interviews with farmers and vision leaders within OAF to determine how we can best establish a robust connection between the needs of the local farmers and the opportunities presented by the new products and services offered by OAF.
Preparing For Growth and Change
Brand Strategy
After synthesising our findings from the field, we embarked on creating a brand strategy that would best resonate with farmers across Kenya. The key goals were to reposition OAF from a small holder credit organisation to a retail and full service provider, connect better with multiple and diverse audiences, enhance agility in new offerings and fuel expansion in new regions across the country.
Brand Architecture
We needed to create a brand that better represented OAF’s new broad product offering, as well as resonate better with farmers and their aspirations.
Brand Creation
Together we rise
Naming
We created “Tupande” – a name that had meaning, and would communicate the essence of the new programme brand; a name that would bring people together, a name that would convey a sense of community and resonate to inspire growth.
Identity
Noting that One Acre Fund is a brand that has significant equity, building deep relationships with farmers in the region for over 15 years now, the new Tupande by One Acre Fund identity builds and leverages this equity.
The colour and entwined leaves tie this identity back to the parent OAF brand while the typeface we chose is simple, clean, functional and modern – giving the identity a forward facing outlook.
Visual Language
To further communicate the Tupande by One Acre Fund look and feel, we came up with a host of stylistic devices and icons that can be used when interfacing with Tupande staff, customers or the general public. This creates consistency across multiple brand touch points, bringing about a feeling of coherence that builds trust.
Launch
Tupande was successfully launched in May 2022 alongside a host of new services for farmers. The official launch was marked by an event at the organization’s Kenya Headquarters in Kakamega, Kenya, and included government dignitaries, staff, and farmers.
