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...
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 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.”
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...