Africa Eats

 

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 two dozen fledglings (graduates) of Fledge, the global network of conscious company accelerators. Dozens of 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. Companies which in 2022 earned over $24 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.

Latest stories

Trying to keep up with Demand

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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...

Cake and Eat it Too

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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...

Profitable, and Rising

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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...

Visiting Agromyx

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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...

Superpowers for Good: Investing to End Hunger and Poverty in Africa

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Superpowers for Good

“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.”

Economic Growth in Africa

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McKinsey title

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...

Tanzania needs 9 billion liters of milk

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Header

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...

Increasing Incomes and Improving Lives

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East Africa Fruits 60 Decibels report header

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...

Dropping post-harvest losses from 40% to 2%

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Various foods in bulk

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...

$24+ million of annual revenues

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Africa Eats Revenues

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...

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