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Sustainable Impact Investment In Africa
Farmer's Weekly
|November 6, 2020
‘Impact investment’ aims to generate social and environmental benefits as well as solid financial returns. AgDevCo, a UK-based project developer, has 50 agribusiness investments of this type in sub-Saharan Africa, linking more than 375 000 smallholder farmers to markets. CEO Daniel Hulls spoke to Glenneis Kriel about his company’s investment approach.
How did AgDevCo start?
AgDevCo was launched in 2009, around the time of the spike in global commodity prices. The idea was to create an impact investment business capable of providing patient [long-term] debt and equity capital to early-stage agribusinesses in sub-Saharan Africa.
The UK government has been our primary funder to date. It recognizes the effectiveness of a business-led approach to development assistance and shares our view about the importance of the agribusiness sector to growth, jobs and food security.
How have AgDevCo and your investment portfolio grown since then?
We started with just US$1 million [about R16,5 million] of funds to invest in Mozambique. Our investment mandate was to make the smallest ‘seed capital’ investments (averaging US$250 000 [R4,1 million]), typically in ownermanaged businesses. By showing what we could achieve with so little, we managed to obtain substantial additional funding. Initially, this was in Mozambique and then also in Ghana and Tanzania. Investing in the early years in those small businesses definitely supported local economic growth and achieved impact, but it was not a good investment in terms of AgDevCo’s own sustainability. The entrepreneurs we were working with required plenty of hands-on support and the size of the investments meant that our costs were always going to outstrip potential returns, even when we were successful.
Given this, we increased the average size of our investments as our funds grew, looking for a mix of early-stage agribusinesses with more formal corporate/ management capability, as well as profitable agribusinesses seeking growth capital.
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