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Africa Go Green Invests in Senior Debt Facility of USD $18 Million in Cold Solutions Rwanda
CS Rwanda will combine cold storage with packhouse, handling and refrigerated logistics services, providing an integrated solution from handling through to distribution. The development also includes a planned 440 kW rooftop solar installation and will target an internationally recognised green-building certification.
- Categories
- Energy, Health Care, Investing, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Twiga Foods Enters Administration After Years of Financial Pressure
"Twiga’s fall is particularly notable because of how much money and attention it attracted during its growth years."
- Categories
- Agriculture, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Analysis: Why AI Carbon Footprinting Tools are Prone to Misleading Results
"The automation of the normally tedious process of creating product carbon footprints (PCFs) is one of the more tantalizing sustainability applications of artificial intelligence. But users of these services should treat the results with caution, suggests a study from researchers at Watershed, a carbon accounting platform."
- Categories
- Energy, Environment, Technology
- Region
- Global
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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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Analysis: The Case for Consolidating Some Donor Activities
Across the major global health institutions, there are processes and systems that either replicate each other directly or would deliver better value if combined. Identifying and consolidating them would free up resources and, in most cases, make the system work better for the countries it is meant to serve.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Region
- Global
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The Catch-22 in Global Health Finance: Why Medical Oxygen is the Test Case for Turning Aid into Investment
By most measures, medical oxygen in sub-Saharan Africa isn’t an investable market. As Alex Losneanu and Jason Houdek at Oxygen CoLab explain, providing medical oxygen is capital-intensive and operationally demanding. That means small- and medium-sized oxygen suppliers typically stall out or get absorbed into grant-funded programs instead of becoming commercially viable, and funders conclude that these SMEs are too fragile to justify the investment risk. They argue that this conclusion is wrong, and also self-fulfilling, reinforcing a Catch-22 that exists across global health. They share findings from a supplier mapping project that show how emerging business models are enabling oxygen SMEs to scale, and propose three shifts in how catalytic capital can be designed to support these and other businesses across the global health sector.
- Categories
- Health Care, Investing
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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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Analysis: The AI Sustainability Paradox
AI is being sold as a tool to solve sustainability’s hardest data problems, from Scope 3 emissions to climate-risk intelligence. But the infrastructure behind that intelligence — data centers, water use, energy demand, chips, grids, and community consent — is becoming its own sustainability test. Drawing on conversations at Trellis Impact 26, Ming Wong explores what AI’s physical footprint means for impact investors, corporate sustainability leaders, and the communities being asked to host the next generation of digital infrastructure.
- Categories
- Energy, Investing, Technology
- Region
- Global
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