Both McKinsey and the International Monetary Fund published papers in the last week talking about the current and coming food security issues in Africa. McKinsey McKinsey’s paper is Safeguarding Africa’s food systems through and beyond the crisis. TL;DR: Africa is a net importer of food and requires $6 billion worth of imported inputs to grow the food it grows. So far, the breakdowns in the...
Over a month ago I warned that the coronavirus pandemic is more than a health crisis in Africa (and the rest of the emerging market countries). Last week I posted the first signs of that coming crisis. It’s here. WATCH: Thousands of people in South Africa stand in a line over two miles long to receive food amid the coronavirus crisis. pic.twitter.com/2rzl2SLHV8— CBS News (@CBSNews)...
If 200,000 (on the way to 400,000) deaths from Covid-19 were not enough to worry about, there is the coming hunger crisis across at least half of the world caused by the lockdowns and economic collapse. I predicted this a month ago and have been talking almost daily with entrepreneurs in Africa with actual stories of the food system collapsing. The New York Times wrote about this crisis a few...
I’m worried for Africa. I’ve spent the last month dropping into the rabbit hole researching, analyzing, and experiencing the Covid-19 pandemic, and I have seen just one minor analysis of what the pandemic means in Africa. I’m American, but have met and taught hundreds of African entrepreneurs, personally visiting many of their businesses in Africa. In the past week I’ve...
A few weeks ago there was a talk on Agroecology by Timothy A. Wise. That term is widely used outside the U.S. for what we’d call sustainable or restorative agriculture. That part of the talk was good, but far more interesting were the stories from the book which the talk summarized, Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food. The author traveled the...
I learned a lot about podcasts over the last year with The Next Step: Podcast, and I’ll continue posting to that channel occasionally, but for the rest of 2019 and 2020, I’m focused on a new podcast, one that look at the multitude of business opportunities across Africa. The other reason for the focus is my opportunity to share these stories on the new Africa Business Radio podcast...
This is the third of a series of blog posts where I’m sharing my learning from visiting Africa (specifically East Africa), to help my fellow Americans and like-minded Europeans. Part one was the visible energy part two opportunities, and this part three on the issues in the way of those opportunities. Issue #1 – 1 billion people, 85%-90% of which are farmers, and yet the continent of Africa...
This is the second of a series of blog posts where I’m sharing my learning from visiting Africa (specifically East Africa), to help my fellow Americans and like-minded Europeans. Part one was the visible energy and part two, opportunities. I’ve spoken and written about how big the opportunities are in Africa, but that was based mostly on seeing the city of Nairobi. My view of the...
I spent half of September touring Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, not to see the wildlife, but to see first hand seven succeeding startups, all of which have attended one program or another from the Fledge accelerator network. The big learning is that I’ve been underestimating the potential opportunities. Underestimating for orders of magnitude. In this and the next few blog posts, I’ll...
I spent the first half of September in East Africa, visiting two of my fledglings in Tanzania, training 14 entrepreneurs in Nairobi, then headed off to Western Kenya and drove to and from Eastern Uganda to visit five more graduates of Fledge, my conscious company accelerator. To share a glimpse of what all that was like, below are a series of video tours of each of the companies: Plus three key...
