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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The biggest challenge the bizi face is keeping up with demand. Truly. Those challenges then trickle down to the other common challenges of scaling up: hiring, operational capital, expanding systems, etc., but the root cause of capital needs at Africa Eats is the “high class problem” of too many orders. For example, here in 2023 Rwanda is one of the 10 fastest growing economies on the...
Impact investing is not one thing, it’s a continuum of tradeoffs between impact and return on investment. At least sometimes. In the leftmost graph below, the top left corner is Wall Street-style investing, aiming to maximize returns with little to no regard for impact. The bottom right corner is philanthropy, maximizing impact with no returns. Everything in between is impact investing...
Africa Eats quite often touts the fast growing revenues of the bizi. But are they profitable? Profitabilty is not commonly a question asked of early-stage fast-growing companies. Over in the corner of venture capital funding tech-based startups, profits are often an afterthought. But the bizi are not tech-based and the reason past updates have not discussed profits is that the bizi are far more...
Africa Eats is not a passive investor in the bizi. We talk to at least one of them each day, helping through the latest challenges or helping think through the next big strategic decision. Plus a few times per year we burn a little jet fuel and many hours of driving to go visit in person. The latest of these visits was to Accra, Ghana to visit Agromyx, which has expanded its product line from...
“Most people in Africa are farmers, and they’re poor not because they’re uneducated or any less intelligent than anyone else,” says Africa Eats founder and CEO Luni Libes. “They’re poor because no one buys their outputs. No one is buying what they’re growing.”