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...
The six months of 2022 continues the revenue growth we’re used to at Africa Eats. An aggregate of $11.6 million was earned by our portfolio companies, putting them on track to reach $24M-$25M for the whole year. To put this in some perspective, when we launched Africa Eats back in 2020 we were touting a total of $6.7 million in revenues in 2019. The same portfolio earned that just in Q2...
The bizi of Africa Eats work with over 100,000 smallholder farmers, buying their outputs or providing their inputs. In either case, growing the incomes of these farmers between 40% and 500%, turning a typically subsistence activity into a middle class income. Growing this network above 100,000 took quite some time, as there needs to be a buyer for every piece of fruit, bag of maize flour, or...
Africa Eats funds and supports for-profit solutions to hunger and poverty. We are capitalists, not philanthropists. But unlike most capitalists, we don’t hide from risk, seeking the safest returns, but instead follow the opportunities where few others are investing, seeking the biggest opportunities for growth and thus the biggest opportunities for returns. That is why we focus on food...
Africa Eats may only have been around since 2020, but 14 of our portfolio companies have been operating since at least 2016. What is amazing to see is the growth of these companies. We’ve previously touted their growth in terms of aggregate revenues. Today let’s instead look at their growth in terms of individual scale, dividing them up by those above $250,000 in annual revenues (USD...
The following is an excerpt from a Sankalp Africa 2022 panel talking with real African entrepreneurs about the challenges of fast-growing companies in Africa.
The speakers include the founders of Agro Supply, East Africa Fruits, Ziweto Enterprise, Paniel Meat Processing, Livestock Bank, and TRUK (Rwanda).