Despite over ¾ of Africans being farmers or children of farmers, not every African is able to eat three meals per day. Most of that is due to post-harvest losses, with up to ⅓ of the grain and almost ½ of all the fruit and vegetables grown never making it to a plate to eat.
Because of the post-harvest losses, Africa spends tens of billions of dollars per year importing food. Ending this downward spiral of mounting debt ends when Africa is a net exporter of food.
There is far too much friction in funding the existing, homegrown, for-profit solutions to hunger and poverty too often ignored by financial institutions. Not just initial funding, but growth-stage funding and critical financial services.
A solution for all these issues is Africa Eats, a holding company with a diverse set of African food/ag companies supporting hundreds of thousands of smallholder farmers, feeding millions of Africans.
Africa Eats does not try solving this problem from scratch, but instead begins with 30 fledglings (graduates) of Fledge, the global network of conscious company accelerators. 30 young, for-profit, growing companies chosen from thousands as most likely to succeed, with impact embedded in their product or service, and who have all received two months of intense training, capital, and follow-on support. 30 companies which in 2021 earned over $16 million in aggregate revenues and which worked directly with over 100,000 smallholder farmers.
See how it works in more detail and contact us if you are interested in owning a piece of this fast-growing portfolio or if you can help us grow these companies even faster.
Entrepreneurship is typically a lonely pursuit, with founders using the advisors, board members, and investors for support, but usually without a group of peers to call upon. That isn’t true at Africa Eats. Our founders have dozens of fellow founders to call upon for advice… and they do. From advice on equipment vendors to advice on strategic decisions to market information spanning...
Paniel Meat Processing and Livestock Bank, two companies created by the same founder merged back together in early 2022. Business is good, growing from $35,000 in annual revenues back in 2017 to over $1.5 million USD in 2022.
In short… it works. Quite well. To see what that means in practice, below is a site visit video shot this month in Kigali, Rwanda.
The “Missing Middle” of capital is the funding for promising young companies between their initial idea and their first few million dollars of revenues. As you can imagine, getting to even $1 million USD in annual revenue is a challenge for African entrepreneurs given relatively few Angels and only a handful of seed funds. Africa Eats helped of our of bizi grow from $100,000 to over...
While they aren’t often the focus of news media, hunger and undernourishment are problems plaguing millions of people every day. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), more than 3 billion people could not afford a healthy diet in 2020, an additional 112 million more people than in 2019. The increase was partly because of rising food prices, with the average cost of a healthy...
This year will mark the milestone of 8 billion people living on Earth. Whenever the global population is discussed the 1.4 billion Chinese and 1.3 billion Indians are touted. The other group of 1.4 billion people live on the continent of Africa.
Africa Eats’ recipe is one cup venture capital fund, one cup business accelerator, and two heaping teaspoons of Berkshire Hathaway. Add in two dozen fast-growing, homegrown, bottom-up for-profit solutions to hunger and poverty across Africa. Stir vigorously. Feeds billions. This isn’t some old family recipe. Neither is it the common way these things are done. But after looking at all the...
Two years ago, Paniel Meat Processing spun out its logistics department into a standalone logistics company, TRUK, serving other food/ag companies in Rwanda. Two years later, they are not just moving food around Rwanda, but all across Eastern Africa, from Kampala in Uganda to Nairobi and Mombasa in Kenya, out to the port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania along with Arusha, Dodoma, Mbeya, and Songara...
The six months of 2022 continues the revenue growth we’re used to at Africa Eats. An aggregate of $11.6 million was earned by our portfolio companies, putting them on track to reach $24M-$25M for the whole year. To put this in some perspective, when we launched Africa Eats back in 2020 we were touting a total of $6.7 million in revenues in 2019. The same portfolio earned that just in Q2...
The bizi of Africa Eats work with over 100,000 smallholder farmers, buying their outputs or providing their inputs. In either case, growing the incomes of these farmers between 40% and 500%, turning a typically subsistence activity into a middle class income. Growing this network above 100,000 took quite some time, as there needs to be a buyer for every piece of fruit, bag of maize flour, or...
Africa Eats funds and supports for-profit solutions to hunger and poverty. We are capitalists, not philanthropists. But unlike most capitalists, we don’t hide from risk, seeking the safest returns, but instead follow the opportunities where few others are investing, seeking the biggest opportunities for growth and thus the biggest opportunities for returns. That is why we focus on food...
