Africa Eats reposted this
Quite a rollercoaster to write, but I'm proud to have authored Part 2 (p 41–120) of FAO's recently published Africa Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition 2025, my part diving into how finance can help ensure that more people in Africa have access to sufficient food, not just enough calories, but healthy and nutritious ones too. Many thanks to Mark Kofi Fynn and reviewers at FAO, WFP, UNECA and the African Union. What hit me hardest I'm apparently somewhat used to development indicators moving in the right direction over time. But hunger and food insecurity in Africa? Moving the wrong way. Working from behind a screen you sometimes go numb to this. This time I didn't. What I loved most Interviewing the innovators on the ground we featured in the report was the best part, here a selection: - Hello Tractor (Jehiel Oliver): Uber for tractors. Farmers request a tractor via text message. Simple, scalable and transformative. - Grounded Investment Company (Renée Engelsman Thekla Teunis Gijs Boers): equity investments in African agri-processors, with regenerative agriculture, and profit-sharing with supplying farmers built into the model. - Aceli Africa (Brian Milder): provides financial incentives to lenders financing agri-SMEs, paying banks a bonus for loans they'd otherwise skip, with first-loss coverage included. Aligning incentives rather than just subsidizing activity. - Africa Eats ('Luni' Libes): a PE/VC approach for African agrifood SMEs, but without the exit. Portfolio revenues up 52% per year over the last decade. - Shea Nut Business Development and Trust Fund (Sulemana Bawa Gbewaa): communities in northern Ghana managing a trust fund that redistributes the financial value of a restored landscape. Bottom-up landscape finance at its finest. - IDH Farmfit Fund (Roel Messie): blended finance at scale, corporates and DFIs co-investing to reach smallholder farmers who would otherwise never see formal finance. The part I enjoyed writing most The annual financing gap to end hunger and malnutrition in Africa is around USD 181 billion-ish. A mindblowing number, until I started thinking about how to put it in perspective. And once I did, it actually didn't seem that mindbogglingly big anymore. Especially when you consider that this is what it would take to end hunger across Africa: - 3.1 times the EU's Common Agricultural Policy budget of USD 58 billion per year, covering 448 million Europeans versus 1.52 billion people in SSA - 36% of the total assets under management of the Dutch ABP pension fund for civil servants and teachers - Roughly same as 10 days of trading volume on the New York Stock Exchange And if you're interested, or simply feel like working your way through 170 pages of food security data on a quiet evening, here's the full report: https://lnkd.in/eikBTqwT