2015 Borlaug Field Award Ceremony
Eric Pohlman
Eric Pohlman, who currently serves as Rwanda Country Director and Senior Partner at the social enterprise One Acre Fund, received the 2015 Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application, Endowed by the Rockefeller Foundation. A U.S. citizen, Pohlman began his work in Rwanda for One-Acre Fund in 2007 by visualizing and implementing a new approach to development that proved extremely successful. Rather than taking the traditional approach of allocating resources to high-value export crops, Pohlman realized that the most effective scalable activity was to formulate a singular, uniform solution for basic-food farmers. His fundamental insight was that among the poor populations of the world, the majority were subsistence farmers. And, the single, most dominant fact of their economic life was that they wanted to grow more food.
To that end, Pohlman focused One Acre Fund’s resources and energies on the production and marketing of local staple crops. He extended the rigors of the scientific method beyond solely pure genetic or chemical technology – and into behavioral technology. His breakthrough approach was to pair crop technology with behavioral technology to create truly broadly disseminated interventions that have produced positive results in rural African communities.