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.
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...
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...
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...