Africa is too often talked about as a single place, when it is in reality 54 countries across a geographic area larger than the US, EU, India, and China combined. McKinsey’s latest report entitled Reimagining economic growth in Africa: Turning diversity into opportunity dives deep into these differences. TL;DR, the one graphic below summarizes the differences in economic growth across the...
According to The Citizen: Despite being second in the continent for the number of livestock, Tanzania is facing a deficit of nine billion litres in order to become milk self-sufficient. The number of cattle has increased from 35.3 million to 36.6 million in the 2022/23 financial year, while that of goats has increased from 25.6 million to 26.6 million. The number of other milk-producing animals...
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. The increases range from 60% for the honey aggregators to 400% for Goldenpot‘s...
The two missions of Africa Eats are lowering hunger and lowering poverty in Africa. Poverty is easier to describe, as most of the Africa Eats bizi buy from smallholder farmers, directly increasing the incomes of those farmers, on average by a factor of two. At East Africa Foods, the income of their farmers are in recent years above the median income for the country of Tanzania, up from the...
Back in February 2021 we touted $9.9 million in aggregate annual revenues from the bizi for calendar year 2020, up from nearly $7 million in 2019. Two years later, the aggregate annual revenues have more than doubled to $24 million. This is keeping up with the fast paced growth of past years. Many of the companies are doubling their annual revenues every 12 to 18 months. East Africa Foods...
The standard Mercator projection maps of the world make the land at the top and bottom of the world look larger than they really are, which in turn makes land in the middle, like Africa, smaller in comparison. In reality, Africa is humongous:
There are thousands of important problems in the world, summarized and characterized into the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Those goals are not ordered by importance, except that many of the other goals can’t be reached until 1 No Poverty is solved, or at least mostly solved. This unvoiced prioritization shows up quite often in the questions of impact investors. For example...
While the news organizations and policy makers often talk about the 1.4 billion people in China and 1.4 billion people in India, it is far rarer when they point out there is also 1.4 billion people in Africa. The population of China is already at its peak and declining, and the population of India is expected to peak in the 2020s, but UN projects the population of just Sub-Saharan Africa to reach...
We know the income and wealth distribution across Africa is unequal. That isn’t news. Neither should it be that the population on the continent is highly unequally distributed too. Near zero in the Sahara and Kalahari deserts, but above 500 people per square kilometer on the coast in Nigeria out westward into Ghana and ending in Cote d’Ivore, the Nile Valley in Egypt, around Addis in...
Americans and Europeans often fail when starting companies in Africa because they bring with them a host of assumptions that they don’t even know are assumptions, until the way business works in Africa proves them wrong. What does work is not always what is most obvious. We spend ours at our annual gatherings sharing not only best-practices, but also ok-, good-, and failed- practices, so...