There are two ways to solve the biggest problems of the world (like hunger and poverty): top-down and bottom-up. Governments, foundations, and most investors take the top-down approach. They look at a region like Africa, declare is “undeveloped” and bring to it solutions they’ve seen elsewhere, which may or may not actually solve the problems. Africa Eats uses a very different...
This week we gathered together the (co)founders and managers of our portfolio companies under a tent in Nairobi, Kenya. Over 50 attendees, flying and driving in from 10 countries across the continent. Over two days we worked together to discover new common challenges, to solve issues, and to find new ways to work together to seize the opportunities building the food/ag supply chain across Africa...
From the founders of Geossy comes Amuria Honey, a new honey processor based in the Amuria District of Uganda.
Podcast #1 Wishes Granted, interviews of the top impact funders so that entrepreneurs and funders, no matter what continent they are on, can connect and build a great future. Today we talked about Africa Eats which is not an investment fund but a holding company–a totally new way to provide capital to entrepreneurs that I think we will see a lot more of. You can best think of Africa Eats as...
There are so many incredible stories to share at Africa Eats. Here is a sampling of the type of solutions we’ve invested in. Homegrown, for-profit solutions with measurable impacts lessening hunger and poverty across Africa.
For more stories, listen to The Opportunity is Africa, a podcast brought to you by Africa Eats
Zebra’s may fix what Unicorns break, but that hasn’t stopped the investing world from their focus on hunting unicorns. Maybe a little in the impact investing space, but there the world of young companies is split into “startups” and “SMEs” with the latter still looked upon as potential unicorns and the latter often derided as unworthy of investment. Rather than debate either of those two...
Most of us are used to savings and investments being the realm of banks and brokers. But for the masses in Uganda (and Sub-Saharan Africa) the banks are too far and too expensive and the local currencies a poor way to save. Instead, savings often take the form of bricks to build a home or a few chickens to feed the children or now with Agro Supply, seeds for the next planting season...
Talk to 100 foundations and government offices about their solution to hunger and poverty in Africa, and you’ll find hundreds of programs that send people out to the villages to train the farmers. These programs are pushing on a rope. Africa Eats pulls on the rope. Specifically, we invest in supply chain companies that buy from smallholder farmers. When you buy from the farmers, they then...
Every year at Sankalp Africa and countless other conferences the big NGOs, governments, and other institutions talk about helping smallholder farmers. The story rarely changes. Post-harvest losses. Low yields. More and better training. At Africa Eats, we think there is a better, far more efficient solution to these problems. Rather than funding and training farmers, we invest in and support the...
Most early-stage and growth-stage startup investors focus on valuation, and the question of whether the investee’s valuation can grow by an order of magnitude or more in the next decade. At Africa Eats, we do look at that, but we focus even more on how efficient our investees are with the money we provide them. How efficient is their use of capital? Specifically, we compute a simple ratio...