Africa Eats and Africa Trees have adapted the Investment Holding Company model to grow impactful African companies. The companies in the portfolios of Africa Eats and Africa Trees started small and are growing rapidly. These companies are improving farmer livelihoods, increasing access to healthy food, and restoring degraded land.

We spoke with Luni Libes, co-founder of Africa Eats and Africa Trees, and Pauline Kariuki, CEO of Orchard Juice. Orchard Juice is a women-owned Kenyan company that specializes in 100% natural freshly squeezed fruit and vegetable juices. Orchard Juice participated in the Land Accelerator. Africa Trees is investing in the company.

Together, we discussed how an investment holding company works, how the model has been put to work to benefit African producers, consumers, and entrepreneurs, and what lessons we can learn for scaling agroecology. The webinar recording, Luni Libes’ slide deck, and Pauline Kariuki’s slide deck are available.

Africa Eats was one of 23 intermediaries that participated in our project “Food Systems Investing in East Africa; The roles of funds in financing food systems transformation.” Find the full report here and a blog on our LinkedIn page here.