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.
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...
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. The increases range from 60% for the honey aggregators to 400% for Goldenpot‘s...
The two missions of Africa Eats are lowering hunger and lowering poverty in Africa. Poverty is easier to describe, as most of the Africa Eats bizi buy from smallholder farmers, directly increasing the incomes of those farmers, on average by a factor of two. At East Africa Foods, the income of their farmers are in recent years above the median income for the country of Tanzania, up from the...
Back in February 2021 we touted $9.9 million in aggregate annual revenues from the bizi for calendar year 2020, up from nearly $7 million in 2019. Two years later, the aggregate annual revenues have more than doubled to $24 million. This is keeping up with the fast paced growth of past years. Many of the companies are doubling their annual revenues every 12 to 18 months. East Africa Foods...
The standard Mercator projection maps of the world make the land at the top and bottom of the world look larger than they really are, which in turn makes land in the middle, like Africa, smaller in comparison. In reality, Africa is humongous:
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...