Andrew Youn

Executive Director and Cofounder of One Acre Fund
With One Acre Fund, Andrew Youn fights poverty in rural sub-Saharan Africa.

Why you should listen

Andrew Youn has lived in rural East Africa for more than 12 years, learning from the world's largest group of people living in poverty: smallholder farmers. In 2006, he was inspired after meeting two farmers in Kenya working similar plots of land. One family was going hungry and one was thriving, harvesting four times as much food. He began asking questions.

Today, the organization Youn cofounded, One Acre Fund, directly serves more than 1.3 million farm families in sub-Saharan Africa, providing them with the quality farm products and training they need to harvest more food and grow their way out of poverty.

Youn is also the cofounder of D-Prize, an organization that funds early-stage startups that are innovating better ways to distribute proven life-enhancing technologies. He received his BA from Yale and MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

More news and ideas from Andrew Youn

Live from TED2020

Hope, action, change: Notes from Session 5 of TED2020

June 19, 2020

Daring, bold, systems-disrupting change requires big dreams and an even bigger vision. For Session 5 of TED2020, the Audacious Project, a collaborative funding initiative housed at TED, highlighted bold plans for social change from Southern New Hampshire University, SIRUM, BRAC, Harlem Children’s Zone, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), Project CETI and One Acre Fund. From aiding […]

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Live from TED2018

The Audacious Project: Notes from Session 4 of TED2018, with 7 bold ideas for global change — and $406 million to support them

April 12, 2018

The lights go down. A voice emerges — strong and hopeful. It’s Laurene Powell Jobs, the founder of philanthropic powerhouse Emerson Collective. “Among the many things I love about TED is the simplicity and clarity of its mission — to spread ideas,” she says. “But in order to create lasting change at scale, we need […]

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