5 lessons for investing in East and West Africa

East and West Africa contain some of the fastest-growing economies in the world, from Niger to Sudan, Ethiopia to Senegal, Rwanda to Côte d’Ivoire. Despite their rapid economic growth, the regions are rife with complex challenges like energy and education access, extreme weather from climate change, and widespread poverty in the face of rapid urbanization. 

At Acumen, we invest in companies that address these challenges in innovative ways, with the end goal of giving people the tools they need to break the cycle of poverty. In 2024, we closed the year with eight new investments in companies in East and West Africa and five follow-ons into existing portfolio companies. That amounted to a total of $3.5 million in capital deployed. We also attracted north of $35 million of additional capital into our portfolio companies from investment partners.

Here are some lessons and takeaways from 2024 that are guiding our thinking in 2025.

1. Integrated solutions for post-harvest loss

Post-harvest loss remains a significant challenge globally and in Africa in particular, where 30% to 40%  of food produced is lost before it reaches consumers. When 80% of the population depends on agriculture for income, as they do in East and West Africa, post-harvest loss becomes crucial to address.  

In 2024, we intensified our investments into models that solve post-harvest loss, marking a follow-on investment into Zebra CropBank, which provides climate-smart, solar-powered micro-warehouses for safe harvest storage and integrated trading platforms connecting farmers to fair markets in West Africa. We also made a new investment into Keep IT Cool, an agritech startup that offers fisherfolk in Kenya a range of cooling solutions and a B2B app that connects them with customers, allowing them to gauge demand in real time. Keep IT Cool won the prestigious 2024 Earthshot Prize for its work revolutionizing food preservation in Kenya. 

Both Zebra CropBank and Keep IT Cool are a reminder that to solve post-harvest loss requires more than handing out coolers or offering refrigerated transportation in isolation. It demands system-level thinking and integrated solutions that combine technology, training, and market access.

2. Building resilience in smallholder farmers  

As extreme weather becomes commonplace, with prolonged bouts of heavy rain, flooding, heat waves, and drought, smallholder farmers must become more resilient. Hence the need to invest in models that derisk primary production for smallholder farmers by offering quality inputs, training, agronomy support, and guaranteed offtake post-harvest sourcing in partnership with larger aggregators like cooperatives and organized farmer groups.

These models allow entrepreneurs to subsidize the cost of sourcing and reach thousands of smallholder farmers. In 2024 under our Trellis initiative, we invested in SweeTunda, a healthy snack company in Kenya that sources 100% of its produce through Kenyan smallholders and their farmer coops. The company stores the produce at a state-of-the-art processing facility that eliminates the possibility of post-harvest loss and allows SweeTunda to pay farmers higher wages and more consistent pay. It also offers farmer services including climate-resilient farming practices.

Likewise, we invested in Wami Agro, a Ghana-based agritech company that buys directly from smallholders in Ghana and then sells their products in bulk on a digital market called WamiMarket. The company also offers Wami Credit, so that smallholders can affordably invest in machinery, high-yield seeds, and fertilizer, and Wami Info, so that smallholders can access critical training, weather updates, and more. 

Through investments like these, we have learned that standalone platforms are not sufficient in markedly elevating livelihoods for smallholder farmers, but have to be coupled with trading and in some cases pre-financing to create smallholder farmer economic prosperity.

3. Businesses need to borrow in local currency

Currency fluctuations are a constant pain in our veins — and in the veins of any company in East and West Africa that earns outside investment. We have written about this in previous blogs, and continue to trial out different solutions to remedy this, but the rub is this: borrowing in a foreign currency like the dollar while earning revenue in local currencies like shillings, naira, or kwacha sets up any company, no matter how strong its business model, for failure.

In 2024, we saw our portfolio companies model different solutions to go around this. We continue to advocate for local currency solutions and propagate models where funders and entrepreneurs both bear the brunt of escalating currency costs. 

4. Valuations: a science, not an art

As the entrepreneurial market in East and West Africa heats up, a growing lack of consensus has emerged between investors and entrepreneurs on valuations. Some of the numbers that start-ups draw up necessitate clearer understanding on the basis of valuations. For instance, drawing comparisons to companies in markets massively differentiated from the entrepreneurs on the continent is unsatisfactory and can lead to unfortunate outcomes for everyone. In 2025, we’re looking to collaborate with other early-stage funders in the sector and sensitize entrepreneurs on acceptable valuation ranges.

5. Non-dilutive capital is as necessary as investment capital

Last year cemented the importance of pre-investment non-dilutive capital for potential pipeline companies. Entrepreneurs have utilized this funding to deepen their research and development, pivot business models, and increase technical know-how into the organization. The result has been accelerated growth within the portfolio, strengthened governance, and stronger financial management within teams. 

Consider CropSafe in West Africa, which has developed a groundbreaking method for drying and preserving grains that allows smallholder farmers to avoid post-harvest loss. Traditional methods take up to three weeks to dry grains and lack adequate protection against infestations. CropSafe’s dryers take just seven hours. Last year we supplied CropSafe with post-investment non-dilutive capital so that it could research, develop, and pilot processing equipment for shea nuts and palm kernel. This breakthrough results in increased productivity for female smallholder farmers who in the past had to do these processes manually and expands CropSafe’s reach into a new sector. 

Supplying companies with pre- or post-investment non-dilutive capital remains an integral part of our investment strategy in 2025. Speaking more broadly, the lessons from 2024 serve as a valuable compass as we navigate the constantly changing environments of our sectors in the new year. We continue to be attuned to our end-consumers and the challenges that they navigate and seek to curate financial solutions for the entrepreneurs that we serve.