"Rooted in Africa, Built for the World"

Masterclass Africa Presents Course Teaser: The Business Case Nobody Told You Here is the number that should keep every mango farmer's investor up at night: across African value chains, mango post-harvest losses sit in a range as wide as 36 to 60.6 percent, with Ghana-specific studies citing losses between 20 and 50 percent, and a separate study putting Ghanaian mango losses as high as 49 percent. In Kenya, Africa's fourth-largest mango producer at over 700,000 tonnes annuall

Africa Brew Brief — Investigating the trade, policy, and value chains shaping Africa's agribusiness future* Maize feeds more Africans than any other crop on Earth, yet it is not African at all. It is a New World grass that Portuguese ships carried onto African shores five centuries ago — and today it sits at the center of a $44–58 billion continental market, a nutrition crisis, a soil health emergency, and one of the most consequential agribusiness bets of the next decade. ##

There is a joke buried inside the world's most caffeinated industry, and Africa is the punchline. The continent that gave the world coffee — the birthplace of the crop itself — exports its beans for less than $2 a kilogram and buys a finished jar of instant coffee made from those same beans back at prices that would make a smallholder farmer weep. This is the story of Robusta: the unglamorous, high-caffeine, high-yield bean nobody brags about at a specialty coffee tasting, bu

There are months on the calendar that simply belong to a place. For Kenya, August 2026 is one of them. Across three weeks, Nairobi becomes a convening ground for the sectors that define the country's economic identity — tourism and hospitality, food and agribusiness, energy, and its most storied export: coffee. And for the first time, that momentum extends to London, where the diaspora and the trade meet on foreign soil. This is not incidental clustering. It is the visible re

Ninety-six years after a young Indian trader named Muljibhai Prabhudas Madhvani set up a 150-tonne-a-day cane crusher on the shores of Lake Victoria, Kakira Sugar Limited now crushes over 2 million tonnes of cane a year and generates 51MW of electricity through its bagasse co-generation plant — enough to cover the entire energy requirement of the factory and estate, with the surplus exported as green power to Uganda's national grid. Of that 51MW, roughly 32MW is consumed inte

For years, the conversation around Africa's agribusiness and hospitality potential has centred on capital. Investors ask where the deal flow is. Founders ask where the funding is. But a quieter, more foundational gap sits underneath both conversations: skills. Too many capable entrepreneurs are building brilliant products and businesses without the structured knowledge transfer needed to scale them, export them, or professionalise them to the standard global markets and guest

Green Gold: Why Plantain Is Africa's Best-Kept Trillion-Calorie Secret Africa Brew Brief There is a fruit that feeds more people across this continent than wheat, and yet it rarely appears in a single continental trade strategy, rarely secures a dedicated processing line, and almost never earns a place in an investment pitch deck. It is not a delicacy. It is not exotic. It is plantain — boiled, fried, pounded, and dried in nearly every kitchen from Lagos to Kampala, and almos

Côte d'Ivoire | Cashew Processing & Export Salma Seetaroo was not looking for a cashew business. Born and raised in Mauritius, she built her early career as a mining finance banker, working deals across the African continent. Her path into cashew was a matter of professional accident. In 2018, while advising on the purchase of a failed cashew processing factory near Abidjan, in Azaguié — around 40km from the city — she was conducting due diligence on behalf of owners looking

Investigating the trade, policy, and value chains shaping Africa's agribusiness future.** The Announcement Is the Easy Part Every few months, an African-founded food or beverage brand posts the photo that every founder dreams of: a product facing on a Tesco, Sainsbury's, or Waitrose shelf, tagged with the retailer's logo and a caption thanking "everyone who supported the journey." It is treated, understandably, as the finish line. In reality, it is closer to a starting gun —

The Origin Story Ayoola Foods Limited was incorporated in September 1991 under the leadership of founder, Managing Director and Chief Executive Engr. Olaye. What started as a micro-enterprise operating out of Ipaja, Lagos, has since grown into a medium-scale manufacturer with customers spanning Nigeria and the wider world. The founding thesis was not the domestic market. It was homesickness. Ayoola's original focus was exporting Nigerian food products to meet the desire of Ni

There is a crop growing in nearly every backyard from Enugu to Kumasi, feeding tens of millions of people, and generating almost no wealth for the continent that grows most of it. It has no ticker symbol, no futures contract, no seat at the commodity exchanges that decide the fate of cocoa, coffee, or cashew. It is cocoyam — known in global trade circles as taro — and its story is a masterclass in how Africa keeps handing away the value it grows. Botanically, cocoyam is reall

The Brand Britain Thinks Is Local, Built on Origin It Rarely Names Yorkshire Tea markets itself on Yorkshire pride — dales, cricket, "proper brew," a county identity so strong most British consumers assume the tea itself grows there. It doesn't. Not a single leaf. Launched in 1977 as a regional blend, Yorkshire Tea combines leaves from roughly 20 tea estates, primarily from Assam in India and regions in Kenya and Rwanda in Africa, with the actual blending taking place at faci

There are men who build brands, and there are men who build the conviction that Africa deserves brands worthy of its story. Thebe Ikalafeng belongs to the second category. For over three decades, he has done more than any single individual to insist that Africa stop borrowing other people's narratives and start owning its own. On 15 July, he turned 60. This is his story. **From Kimberley to the World** Ikalafeng grew up in Kimberley, raised by his grandparents while his mothe

Kwango Province, DRC, 2014.A convoy of tractors. A sitting president climbing into the cab to harvest maize for the cameras. A promise that Congolese agriculture was about to leap from subsistence to industrial scale. Three years later: abandoned machinery, fired workers, a South African investor suing the state in Paris, and a former Prime Minister facing prosecution for embezzlement. This is the story of Bukanga Lonzo — and why every agribusiness operator, investor, and far

Affiong Williams was training to become a medical doctor before she became a fruit processor. That shift alone tells you something about how she thinks: she left a stable, well-regarded path, then left another stable career in South Africa, to build a category that simply did not exist in the Nigerian consumer market. In 2012, dried fruit snacks were not a recognised product line in Nigerian retail. There was no local competitor to benchmark against, no distribution playbook

There is a version of the African fast-food story that gets told often: global chains arrive with deep pockets, superior supply chains, and decades of brand equity, and local players either get acquired, get squeezed into a niche, or disappear. Hungry Lion is the exception that deserves far more scrutiny than it gets. A South African-born fried chicken chain has grown to more than 500 stores across nine African countries, employs roughly 10,000 people, and is now ramping up e

The Bean Stays Home: Inside Africa's Bid to End a Century of Raw Cocoa Exports — and the Capacity Gap Nobody's Pricing In *Four governments just declared the raw-export era over. The grinding numbers say otherwise — for now.* ## The Declaration On July 15, 2026, Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire and Cameroon signed the Abuja Declaration, forming an alliance that aims to end exports of raw cocoa beans and negotiate with international buyers as a single bloc controlling about 75 pe

There is a particular kind of ingenuity that only emerges from displacement — the ability to look at what was once dismissed as poor people's food and see, instead, the architecture of a future economy. Pierre Thiam, born and raised in Dakar, has spent three decades proving that fonio, an ancient Sahelian grain older than written memory, was never the problem. The problem was that the world had not yet built the infrastructure to meet it. **From Dakar's Kitchens to New York's

Fonio has the brand. Bambara groundnut has the balance sheet. The question is which continent builds the bridge between them first. ## What Exactly Is the Product Bambara groundnut — *Vigna subterranea* (L.) Verdc. — is a grain legume, not a true groundnut, closer botanically to cowpea than to peanut. It goes by many names across the continent: nyimo beans and ditloo in Southern Africa, jugo bean, earth pea, and in West Africa simply "Bambara bean" or "voandzou." Nutritionall

Africa Brew Brief Nestlé's African story doesn't begin with a bold market entry. It begins with condensed milk moving along colonial-era trade routes. By 1905, Nestlé and Anglo-Swiss already operated more than 20 factories and was selling into Africa, Asia, Latin America and Australia. Manufacturing arrived decades later. The first Nestlé products reached South Africa in the 1870s, with the company formally registering there in 1916, and its first African factory opened in 19