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.
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...
How do you get from problem to solution to profitable company in Africa? Like everywhere else, it’s complicated, but the third step is simple. Step 1, find a problem and develop a solution that customers will pay for. For Africa Eats, that problem is most often two sided, lack of demand by smallholder farmers and lack of supply by formal and informal restaurants and retailers. Step 2...
Africa Eats is a holding company that began with two dozen investees. That is accurate, but “investee” isn’t the right word. That word misses the relationships we’ve build with these companies over the past six years through their participate at and after a Fledge accelerator. Africa Eats is a holding company with two dozen subsidiaries. No, that isn’t right either...
With bizi located in eight countries across the second largest continent on Earth, with operations spread out within those countries, and often operations crossing into neighboring countries, it is a huge undertaking to visit even a handful of these companies. The next best way to visit is through site visit videos:
Africa Eats is incorporated in Mauritius. Why Mauritius? It’s the #1 choice for headquarters of pan-African companies, especially investment companies. Mauritius is also neutral ground. Africa Eats investee companies operate in many countries in many regions of Africa. Best for headquarters is to add to that diversity instead of playing any favorites. Lastly, Mauritius has an excellent...
More than 48% of the produce grown is wasted in Tanzania, amounting to over 4.7 million tons of food that would have otherwise been income to farmers. This is due to post-harvest losses suffered by smallholder farmers resulting from poor farming, transport and storage mechanisms. Much of this is due to farmers’ lack of access to markets, which makes them rely on middlemen. Usually it takes two to...
Tanzania contributes over a third of all the sunflower seeds produced in Africa yet over half of the cooking oil is imported, costing the country over 120 million USD each year. OBRI Tanzania works directly with smallholder sunflower growers to process and supply high quality, healthier and affordable sunflower cooking oil targeting low-income families in Tanzania who constitute about 80% of the...
Western Kenya consumes 400,000 chickens every day, but only 20% is locally produced. The rest are produced elsewhere in Kenya or imported from Uganda. Chicken Basket works directly with smallholder poultry farmers through aggregation, processing and distribution of chickens into the local market. We train farmers on sustainable and commercialization of poultry farming, the vetenary officer must...