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.
What happens when you put two dozen entrepreneurs in a room together for two days, and rather than speak to them, facilitate conversations between them? The results feel magical. The companies open up to to share the challenges they face, and from that they share solutions that have already been tried including solutions that actually work. Challenges such as how to efficiently work with 1,000+...
In the 2022 letter to shareholders, one of Warren Buffett’s best quotes was, “At Berkshire, there will be no finish line.“ Africa Eats is not a fund. We don’t exist for just 10 years, to create a short-term growth spurt, gain a profit for our investors, and disappear from the world. Instead, our business model includes some core ideas from Berkshire Hathaway, with the...
After attending Sankalp Africa and spending two days in-person with the bizi CEOs and co-founders, it was time to visit a few bizi in person on the other side of Kenya. Boka Eats in Kisii After visiting Boka Eats we met Governor Simba Arati (who didn’t allow cameras in the meeting). The EU paid for the factory and Kisii County is the landlord, so we met to tell him about Africa Eats and our...
There are hundreds of challenges when growing a company from tiny to $1 million in annual revenues. Hundreds more unique to growing companies in Africa. Funding is the #1 challenge. The next 99 are rarely ever talked about. And no one has yet created a compendium of these challenges nor stories of how they were solved. Until now. Africa Thrives is a website and book written by African...
The first container of Swahili Honey beeswax and honey is on its way from Tanzania to Poland.
A conversation with Luni Libes, serial entrepreneur and investor, about the enormous opportunities of African food companies and on buying from smallholder farmers and selling into the local regional markets. We also discuss why the traditional venture capital model doesn’t make any sense and a holding company does, plus why and how he wants to take the holding company public in a few years’ time...
The biggest learning from 2022 is that the plan envisioned in 2018 works. In 2018, the vision was an investment holding company that helps high growth food/ag-focused SMEs (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises) in Africa grow faster than traditional venture capital or debt funds. The core of the plan was to fill in the “missing middle” of capital for a few dozen companies, providing them the...
Nothing replaces visiting companies in person. Next best from that are the video guided tours. If you’ve not watched all of those, try that tonight instead of Netflix. Beyond that, here are some images from the bizi in 2022. An original truck from TRUK Rwanda The winning pitch from East Africa Fruits Ziweto‘s new animal feed factory Zamgoat processing goats Amuria Honey beehive...
Africa’s Business Heroes is a seven-month competition that winnows tens of thousands of African entrepreneurs down to 10 on-stage live on TV, to 3 for a final stage of Q&A with live judges, to 1 grand prize winner. The 2022 Africa Business Hero is Elia Timotheo, founder/CEO of East Africa Fruits. The winning 3-minute pitch Highlights from the Grand Finale video stream East Africa Fruits...
“The Missing Middle” is what we call the gap in finance the majority of entrepreneurs face in getting from a viable prototype or early customers to a full-scale proven business. This talk was presented at Sankalp Global 2022 by Luni Libes, co-founder and CEO of Africa Eats. In Part 1, Luni explains who he is, and how he came to fill in this otherwise missing middle. In Part 2...