It’s almost time for Africa Eats’ annual “Gathering”, where all of the bizi founders fly to Nairobi for two days of facilitated discussions including a deep dive into building the missing business infrastructure for African SMEs, including a plan to unlock the capital markets. This event is unlike any other we know of. It is the day after Sankalp, but far more interactive...
Where is the line between small SME and medium SME and too big to be SME?
There is no global authority that defines SME, but the EU sets a definition for the EU. The boundaries between “micro“, small, and medium are a mix of employee headcount with either revenues or balance sheet.
Africa Eats specializes in turning micro enterprises into small and then medium-sized enterprises. See Fast-growing SMEs for examples of seven success stories.
Fast-growing SMEs
If you have to summarize Africa Eats into just seven words… Africa Eats helps quickly scale up SMEs. Give us more words and we’ll talk about investing in the food/ag supply chain, filling in the gaps of business infrastructure, and our progress ending hunger and poverty. But we do all that by helping SMEs scale up from tiny to millions in annual revenues. Below are seven examples of...
Visiting Ziweto Nutrition Solutions
Ziweto Enterprise started as a wholesaler and retailer of agrovet supplies, and they have grown to be the largest such company in Malawi. Last year Ziweto Nutrition Solutions was opened, manufacturing animal feeds to sell in those stores. Last month we visited the factory in Lilongwe, Malawi.
Ziweto Enterprise
About Us
Ahead of Plan (Looking Back to Look Forward)
Africa Eats was founded in July 2020, but the business plan was written back in late 2018 and the financial model iterated many times in 2019. It is interesting to look back at the early models to see what has changed. Little has changed in terms of structure, but quite a lot has changed in terms of scale. The 2019 model seemed aggressive at the time, but now it looks tame. In 2019 the estimate...
Increasing Incomes and Improving Lives (II)
Africa Eats’ mission is to lower hunger and eliminate poverty across Africa. Dropping post-harvest losses from 40% to 2% is one way to lower hunger. The other is increasing the incomes of farmers, which simultaneously and directly eliminates poverty. On average, the bizi double the income of their farmers. We’ve seen that proven in the first 60 Decibels report on the farmers of East...
The World is Becoming more African
It’s quite rare when the U.S. media has something nice to say about Africa. This week was an exception, in The New York Times, in an interactive digital article about the population growth and economic growth of the African continent. The median age in Africa here in 2023 is just 19 years old, nearly a decade younger than in India and the rest of South Asia. By 2050, more than 1/3rd of all...
Blended capital
Africa Eats is a for-profit investment holding company, but while the bizi earn profits, at the same time they lower hunger and poverty for hundreds of thousands of smallholder farmers. The emphasis of that impact attracts a wide variety of capital providers. Some impact investors that follow the mantra of “doing well by doing good.” Others that care more about the “doing...
Over $2.8 million per month
Which sounds and feels biggest? $2.83 million per month $8.5 million per quarter $34 million per year Back in mid-2020, when Africa Eats was founded, we were touting total aggregate revenues across the whole portfolio of companies as $7 million. That was the actual revenue earned by the “bizi” in 2019. In the three months of Q2 2023 (April-June), the bizi earned $8.5 million. That is...
Startups with Profits?
Venture capital and angel investing are realms filled with unspoken assumptions. One such assumption is that companies should burn through substantial capital before even considering profitability. This notion is misguided! Countless startups, often overlooked by these investors, are compelled to be profitable to survive. If these investors took a moment to recognize these startups, they would...