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Angola Launches $211 Million Agricultural Value Chain Project to Transform Eastern Economy and Cut Food Imports
The Eastern Region Agricultural Value Chain Development Project is designed to support production, processing, storage and marketing across crops including wheat, rice, soybeans, beans, groundnuts, cassava, coffee, cocoa and palm oil. The African Development Bank approved $211.4 million for the project in November 2025.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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EcoNomad Solutions Secures £230K for On-Farm Waste-To-Energy System
"Small and mid-sized livestock farms face mounting pressure from rising energy and fertiliser costs, tightening slurry and waste regulations, and pressure to reduce methane emissions. Yet existing anaerobic digestion systems are engineered for large industrial-scale operations, making them uneconomical or operationally impractical for smaller producers."
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The Missing Asset Class: How Aggregated MSMEs Could Unlock the Next Wave of Impact Investing Deal Flow
Despite years of emphasizing the need to reach underserved businesses, the impact investing sector is increasingly focusing on lower-risk opportunities. According to Adanna Chukwuma at CARE, mature companies have drawn the largest increases in impact assets over the past six years, while funding to seed-stage enterprises has contracted — despite multiple financial instruments designed to serve the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in this segment. As she explains, this trend excludes a vast band of businesses with real revenue, real demand and real growth potential: aggregated MSMEs, i.e., individual enterprises that have joined together to contract and borrow as one. She explores the investment opportunity in these MSMEs, and calls for the creation of a new asset class around them, explaining how this could unlock the flow of impact capital to enterprises that remain systemically overlooked.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Investing
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The Smallholder-Supermarket Disconnect: Addressing the Missing Links that Separate East African Farmers from Formal Retail Markets
Smallholder farmers are the backbone of East African agriculture, accounting for approximately 75% of production in several countries. At the same time, formal food retail is expanding across the region. Yet as Daniel Njiwa at AGRA and Kris Ansin and Audrey Tsoi at TechnoServe explain, despite this alignment, the formal retail market remains inaccessible to many smallholder farmers, as a range of barriers prevent them from supplying these vendors. They share learnings from a pilot program that highlighted some of these constraints, and explore how supermarkets can work through aggregators that consolidate and coordinate supply from multiple farmers to source smallholder produce at scale.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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Acumen Closes $58 Million Impact Fund, the First to Drive Climate Adaptation for Smallholder Farmers
The Acumen Resilient Agriculture Fund (ARAF) seeks to build an ecosystem of agribusinesses that improve farmers’ livelihoods and build their resilience to climate change.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Investing
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Beanstalk AgTech Announces the Launch of Monsoon Ventures to Accelerate Agtech Commercialisation in Southeast Asia
The studio will invest capital, recruit complementary commercial expertise, map value chain pathways, and help ventures attract the right investors or strategic partnerships with regional players.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Environment, Technology
- Region
- South Asia
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Swedfund Invests $12 Million to Strengthen Climate-Resilient Agriculture and Food Security Across Africa
The financing will support businesses providing essential services to smallholder farmers, including improved access to agricultural markets, affordable finance, digital technologies, quality farm inputs and post-harvest infrastructure.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Finance
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Viewpoint: Why African Agriculture Must Prepare for its Nana Benz Moment
African smallholder farming is facing a succession crisis that threatens the loss of generations of accumulated knowledge.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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