"Rooted in Africa, Built for the World"

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

Founder, Pure and Just Food | CEO, Yvaya Farm There is a particular kind of African founder who refuses to choose between conscience and commerce — who builds a company and a cause with the same hands. Yvette Tetteh is that founder. A Ghanaian-British entrepreneur and Stanford graduate, she co-founded Pure and Just Food in 2018 with Emmanuel Ampadu, building a company that does something deceptively simple and structurally radical: it takes Ghana's abundant, undervalued fruit

Africa Brew Brief: The 2026 Super El Niño and Africa's Value Gap A continent that grows the world's food security risk cannot keep importing its resilience. ## The Signal in the Pacific A strong El Niño is now confirmed and strengthening. NOAA's Climate Prediction Center moved from Watch to Advisory status in June 2026, with El Niño conditions present and a 97% probability of persistence through early spring 2027. Sub-surface Pacific waters are running as much as 6°C above no

South Africa's pink gin story is usually told as a lifestyle trend. It should be read as an agribusiness case study — one that shows what happens when African biodiversity is allowed to travel the full value chain, from soil to shelf, inside African hands. The Origin Point Musgrave Spirits launched South Africa's first pink gin in 2015, ending years in which gin drinkers had to travel abroad to access a trend already reshaping global markets. It arrived inside a craft gin wav

Vanilla is the cured seed pod ("bean") of an orchid vine, primarily *Vanilla planifolia* — the same cultivar grown in both Madagascar and Uganda, prized for its creamy, high-vanillin flavor profile. Unlike most spices, vanilla is not simply harvested and dried; it is manufactured through a labor-intensive curing process — hand-pollination of the flower (the orchid lacks natural pollinators outside its native Mexico), harvesting green pods after roughly nine months, then blanc

There is a particular kind of entrepreneur emerging across East Africa right now — one who was educated in Europe, understands how European buyers think, and has chosen to bring that fluency home rather than build a career inside it. Ivan Shema, founder and CEO of 1000 Hills Products, is one of them. Shema studied at the Warsaw School of Economics and built his professional base in the Kraków metropolitan area, giving him a working understanding of Central European trade, ret

Investigative agribusiness intelligence | Rooted in Africa. Built for the World.* --- Rwanda sits at a decision point every serious African agribusiness eventually faces: where does value-added processing actually pay, and where does it just look good on a strategy deck. Roasting coffee close to the farm gate is the correct instinct. But the market you ship it to determines whether that instinct becomes a margin captured at home — or another line item in the value gap Africa

From Human Resources to Hollywood-on-the-Niger Long before she was Africa's foremost media mogul, Mosunmola "Mo" Abudu was a corporate HR executive. She began her career in HR before eventually leading HR at ExxonMobil Nigeria, and later ran her own recruitment firm, Vic Lawrence & Associates. It's a detail worth sitting with, because it explains something about how she has built EbonyLife: with the discipline of an operator, not just the instincts of a creative. She went on

How the NFU turned a pin badge into a national movement — and the blueprint AfCFTA needs to do the same across a continent There is a small gold wheatsheaf pin. Politicians wear it once a year, on Back British Farming Day, from the Prime Minister down to backbench MPs nobody has heard of. It costs almost nothing to produce. It has helped move billions of pounds of policy, rewritten trade law, and put a "Buy British" button on every major supermarket website in the country. Af

Africa One Brand Founder Profile The Plan That Didn't Survive Contact With the Bank Hadija Jabiri never set out to become a farmer. As a boarding school student in Tanzania, working the school farm was assigned as punishment, not aspiration. What she did carry, even then, was an unshakable pull toward building something of her own, and an admiration for Aliko Dangote that shaped how she thought about scale from the very beginning. She registered her company in her first year

An Africa Brew Brief investigation into production, markets, and the value-addition gap --- What Exactly Is the Product Moringa oleifera — known across the continent as the drumstick tree, the horseradish tree, or the ben oil tree — is a fast-growing, drought-tolerant tree native to the foothills of the Himalayas in South Asia, though it now thrives across the tropics and subtropics, including large swathes of sub-Saharan Africa. It is a drought-resistant, nutritionally dense

Every hospitality skyline across Francophone West Africa tells a story about who owns the room you sleep in. Walk into a Radisson, a Sheraton, or a Marriott in Dakar, Abidjan, or Niamey, and the odds are the brand is foreign, the management contract is foreign, and the equity sits somewhere in Brussels, Atlanta, or Dubai. Yérim Sow built something different — and rarer. He built the ownership. **The Man Before the Empire** Yérim Habib Sow was born in 1967 into a family that a

Across the highlands of Oromia, the lowveld of Zimbabwe, and the hills of Rwanda, a modest crop has been quietly building one of the continent's most underappreciated export stories. It doesn't carry the glamour of coffee or the scale of cocoa. But the small white bean — known in trade circles as the navy bean, haricot bean, or pea bean — sits at the center of a global protein market worth close to $5 billion, a UK import appetite measured in the hundreds of thousands of tons

By RIC Brands | Africa One Brand Series** --- There is a particular kind of courage required to build a business around a crop most of your own countrymen have never heard of. Cobi-Jane Akinrele found hers on the back of an Uber, heading into the chaos of Mile 12 market in Lagos, chasing a rumour about a grain called fonio. That single trip — sparked by an article claiming fonio could be the next global superfood — would eventually pull a Cambridge-educated, British-born Nige

How 16,500 hectares of Lagos coastline became the continent's most instructive case study in what agribusiness infrastructure could look like* --- There is a stretch of Atlantic coastline east of Lagos where, twenty years ago, there was mostly bush, fishing settlements, and lagoon. Today it holds the world's largest single-train oil refinery, West Africa's deepest seaport, a planned $450 million international airport, and a fast-growing industrial city designed by the same fi

How HORECA Mastery, powered by Masterclass Africa, is building the operational backbone Africa's hospitality boom is missing --- Africa's hospitality and food service sector is one of the fastest-growing economic frontiers on the continent. New hotels are breaking ground from Kigali to Lagos. Restaurant and café culture is exploding in cities that barely had a formal dining scene a decade ago. Short-let apartments are reshaping urban accommodation faster than regulation can k

Tinashe Nyamudoka: The Sommelier Who Built a Wine Brand Called Home Africa One Brand Founder Profile ## From Harare Supermarket Floor to South Africa's Top Wine Lists Tinashe Nyamudoka's journey into wine began nowhere near a vineyard. He started his career in a grocery store in Zimbabwe, working his way up to a management position just before the country's major economic crisis in 2008. That crisis pushed him south: he left Zimbabwe amid civil unrest and hyperinflation, hopi

Liquid Gold: Inside Rwanda's Race to Turn Avocado Surplus Into an Export Empire Africa Brew Brief — Investigative Feature --- There is a particular kind of waste that doesn't look like waste at first. It looks like abundance. Drive through Gisagara District in Rwanda's Southern Province during harvest season and you'll see it: trees heavy with fruit, roadside stalls overflowing, farmers with more avocados than the local market can absorb. It looks like prosperity. It is, in f

Every founder story has an origin scene. For Margaret "Maggy" Nyamumbo, it isn't a garage or a dorm room — it's her grandfather's coffee farm in Kenya. He had been a driver for the colonial government, and through that position managed to secure coffee seedlings at a time when growing coffee was tightly restricted for native Kenyans under British rule. He became one of the first Kenyans permitted to grow coffee by British settlers. Three generations later, that same soil woul