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...
Ziweto Enterprise now manufacturers animal feed concentrates in Lilongwe, Malawi, helping lower the cost of animal feeds for smallholder farmers in Malawi, making livestock more affordable to more farmers.
Entrepreneurship is typically a lonely pursuit, with founders using the advisors, board members, and investors for support, but usually without a group of peers to call upon. That isn’t true at Africa Eats. Our founders have dozens of fellow founders to call upon for advice… and they do. From advice on equipment vendors to advice on strategic decisions to market information spanning...
Paniel Meat Processing and Livestock Bank, two companies created by the same founder merged back together in early 2022. Business is good, growing from $35,000 in annual revenues back in 2017 to over $1.5 million USD in 2022.
In short… it works. Quite well. To see what that means in practice, below is a site visit video shot this month in Kigali, Rwanda.
The “Missing Middle” of capital is the funding for promising young companies between their initial idea and their first few million dollars of revenues. As you can imagine, getting to even $1 million USD in annual revenue is a challenge for African entrepreneurs given relatively few Angels and only a handful of seed funds. Africa Eats helped of our of bizi grow from $100,000 to over...
While they aren’t often the focus of news media, hunger and undernourishment are problems plaguing millions of people every day. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), more than 3 billion people could not afford a healthy diet in 2020, an additional 112 million more people than in 2019. The increase was partly because of rising food prices, with the average cost of a healthy...
This year will mark the milestone of 8 billion people living on Earth. Whenever the global population is discussed the 1.4 billion Chinese and 1.3 billion Indians are touted. The other group of 1.4 billion people live on the continent of Africa.
Africa Eats’ recipe is one cup venture capital fund, two cups business accelerator, and three heaping teaspoons of Berkshire Hathaway. Add in two dozen fast-growing, homegrown, bottom-up for-profit solutions to hunger and poverty across Africa. Stir vigorously. Feeds billions. This isn’t some old family recipe. Neither is it the common way these things are done. But after...
Two years ago, Paniel Meat Processing spun out its logistics department into a standalone logistics company, TRUK, serving other food/ag companies in Rwanda. Two years later, they are not just moving food around Rwanda, but all across Eastern Africa, from Kampala in Uganda to Nairobi and Mombasa in Kenya, out to the port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania along with Arusha, Dodoma, Mbeya, and Songara...