Luni shares his journey from tech entrepreneurship to impact investing, the creation of the global impact accelerator Fledge, and the unique “Berkshire Hathaway” approach behind Africa Eats. The conversation highlights how Africa Eats supports African entrepreneurs in scaling food and agriculture businesses that uplift smallholder farmers and reduce food waste—while maintaining profitability.

Key Points from the Podcast:

• 0:00 | Introduction to the Impact Innovation Podcast

• 1:07 | Meet Luni Libes and his background in tech

• 3:28 | Shift from tech startups to impact

  • Founding of Fledge: A global impact business accelerator

  • Why African startups faced challenges in securing funding

• 10:19 | Africa Eats

  • There is a huge economic gap for funding African companies15:35

  • How Africa Eats works with farmers to reduce waste and boost income

• 15:35 | Scaling and growing Africa Eats

• 16:54 | Berkshire Africa: A old model of patient investing in a new space

• 23:41 | Africa Eats on the Mauritius Stock Exchange and what that means for liquidity and growth

• 27:40 | Future vision and capital mobilization for Africa Eats

• 32:38 | Impact Opportunity of the Month: Africa Eats

• 34:05 | Impact Inbox: Grants vs Loans vs Equity for impact funding

Links from the Episode

Learn more about Luni Libes at http://lunarmobiscuit.com

More Impact Innovations Content here: https://iig.uicharitable.org/

Invest in Africa Eats here: https://iig.uicharitable.org/impact-opportunities/post/equity-opportunity-africa-eats-FzyiFkOD8IaV0tX

Transcript

Jaxson Thomas - Welcome to the Impact Innovation Group podcast, where we elevate philanthropy to be more efficient, effective, and impactful through collaboration, learning, and innovation. My name is Jaxson Thomas, one of the team members behind the Impact Innovation Group and an associate at UI Charitable Advisors. This is the second episode of our podcast. Today, our co-host, Todd Manwaring, sits down with Luni Libes, the founder of the groundbreaking investment company, Africa Eats.

They'll dive into how Luni is tackling the root causes of food insecurity in Africa by investing in scalable solutions of gritty African entrepreneurs. Later in the podcast, we'll hear from Tanner Mills as he describes the impact opportunity of the month and how you can become more involved with Africa Eats. Finally, we'll wrap up the podcast with our final segment, the Impact Inbox, where we'll get to hear from one of our listening members like you. Let's jump right in.

Todd Manwaring - Luni, it's great having you here today with us. One of the things I'd like to start off with is having you describe just a bit of your transition from the tech VC space and some of your deep involvement in impact investing and what that really looks like and some of the organizations you've created along the way.

Luni Libes -  Okay, I have, I think, a pretty normal pattern from going from tech to impact. I spent the first 20 years in my career building software companies, all here in Seattle. I'll put the first, backed by California VCs. And that was fun. Like all the standard stuff you read about in the magazines and newspapers and blogs. And then I woke up one day, I had four of them still running. I thought I must know something.

I don't know what it is, but I must know something. There's four still selling product. And I was looking for some place to give back, some place to teach the next wave of entrepreneurs. And I stumbled across this business school on Bainbridge Island where I live called Bainbridge Graduate Institute. And it turns out it was the first business school in the world to teach how to do good through the tools of business school, how to do good and do well.

They allowed me to sit in the back of the classroom for that semester. I did the same in the next quarter. And then they started asking me to teach. And once I had been there for nine months and learned that you could do good through business, I just couldn't do another software company. So instead, I started Fledge, which is a business accelerator now network that was based on the ideas of the tech accelerators, but for mission-driven for-profit companies or for impact companies.

Todd Manwaring - Right. And I know that you have a website that contains a lot of this information people could go to and mention some of the books that you've written that mentions some blog and podcast work that you've done. 

Luni Libes - Yeah. So my personal website is lunarmobiscuit.com, which no one's gonna be able to figure out how to spell. So hopefully you put that in the links. And you can just simply ask Google for Lumi Libis and it'll pop up.

Todd Manwaring - Good point. Tell us a little bit more about Fledge. I think that was an interesting step that as I really dove into what you've been doing, as we try to understand more about Africa Eats and this great organization that you've created that's now on the Mauritius Stock Exchange, help us understand what Fledge is and how it's participated in helping organizations throughout the world to do this business with good that you just mentioned.

Luni Libes - Yeah, well, start with what it was. So back in 2012, the idea was that there were tech accelerators, the most famous of which are Y Combinator and Techstars. But they're all focused on tech companies doing the standard, you know, fast grow burn capital VC model. There weren't very many, if any programs like that for impactful companies. Not for the kind of entrepreneurs that I was meeting in the school at BGI or at Net Impact or Echoing Green or any of those. So I made one. It's called Fledge. And originally it was just a little program in Seattle. It was me and a helper. And I ran two programs a year, one in 2012, two in 2013. And then by the time we got to 2016, people started asking me around the world, Can I do what you're doing? Can we run a program like yours in Lima, Peru or Barcelona or Padua, Italy and… the answer was always, have no idea. I don't know anything about those cities. I don't see why we can't. So we did. 

So FLEDGE grew into a network of impact accelerators all over the world that by the time we got to 2020, we had run over 20 programs in more than eight cities. And I lost count. I don't know. It's been a while.

My Fledge, so the entity that owned the Fledge brand, was also a little venture capital fund. And by the time we got to 2020, we had invested in 105 companies in 40 countries. And when I say invested in, it means that they came to an accelerator program somewhere in the world, except in 2020 when it was an online program. But they came to a city, we worked with them for many, many weeks. The original program was 10 weeks long and we invested in them at the same time. So very hands on, very much take apart your business plan and we'll help you put it back together and then introductions to investors afterwards.

Todd Manwaring - Right, right. So some investing with your own organization sounds like, and these connections to others who might participate after hearing what had changed after 10 weeks.

Luni Libes - Yeah, long story, but there's basically three models in the space of business accelerators or business training programs. The most common one is grant funded, it's free. The second most common is you pay us for the service. And the least common one, but the best model is we pay you. So we pay you to come to the program in exchange for equity in your company. Like we're investing, but the cheeky way of saying it is we pay you.

Todd Manwaring - And my understanding is you started to realize a lot of the organizations outside of Africa were getting some of the follow on funding, but that was a struggle for the African organizations that were getting started.

Luni Libes - So by 2019, we did 105 by 2020. So we had done about 85, 90 by 2019. And my job as the person running Fludge was to get them all funded, like to have the least number die as possible. And when you simply looked at the cohorts and you looked at the individual companies and you did any analysis whatsoever, the obvious thing that popped out was that most of the American companies found some funding and most of the European companies had found some funding and some of the Latin American companies had found funding. And I think it was two or three of the African companies, out of like 30. And so something needed to be done to fill in that gap.

Todd Manwaring - What do you think that investors were missing? What was the misunderstanding about Africa that you felt like people just didn't get it?

Luni Libes - Well, one thing is just some numbers that I didn't know then, I know now. 5 % of the world's population is American. I four point something, round up to five. 31 % of all the world's wealth is American. Okay, Africa is 1.4 billion people. So that is more than, it's like a seventh of the population of the world, which is whatever, 13%, 14%. 2% of the world's wealth is in Africa. 

So there simply isn't the money. There aren't the same number of angels. And we're talking about angel investing here and seed funds. So simple numbers, if you think of the US, top 10 % are rich enough to make investments in young companies. Most don't, but 10 % have enough wealth to do that. Well, that's 33 million people. There aren't 33 million people who could do that in Africa despite a billion four total population. It's just, the local money isn't there, which means we have to import money from somewhere. And then you just get to the problems that most Americans only ever hear bad news about Africa. Well, when's the last time you heard good news about Africa in the, literally in the newspaper or the news in your news blog? I do because I'm looking for it, but, in New York Times or Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, probably in the last five years there's been zero good stories. So same thing for Europeans. I don't know, I don't live in Europe, but I'm gathering they're seeing most of the same, maybe a few better stories. 

And so they're just scared because all they see is bad news. They don't see, they're missing the fact that of the 20 fastest growing economies, more than 10 of them are in Africa. They're missing the fact that, there's a billion four people, same population as India, same population as China, and a middle class is growing faster than either of those two countries. Like, they don't see the economic opportunities that those of us who are actively investing see.

Todd Manwaring - And I know a lot of the people who are involved with us at UI Charitable Advisors, there's a lot of interest in Africa. There's really an appetite to understand more about what's going on in Africa. And I think the story of Africa Eats is really something that can give people a great perspective of different ways that organizations have gotten involved.

Help us understand then, what is the problem that Africa Eats is solving that really wasn't happening with Fledge? Why the creation of Africa Eats?

Luni Libes - So literally, I did this analysis in 2019 and said, all right, we need an instrument to fund these companies in Africa. And of the portfolio we had from FLEDGE, most of the companies were in the food and ag space. And so I said, all right, let's just do food and ag. Let's just focus on the food and ag companies. Let's not focus on the other ones, two fintechs in a healthcare company and so forth. The premise was, if we go forth as a collection of companies to the impact investors and say, fund the whole group, don't pick and choose, fund the whole group, we understand these companies because they've all been through a Fledge program somewhere in the world, in multiple different cities in different years. We will efficiently put the capital to use in those companies. We will help them grow faster than they would without the capital or with investments in other forms.

We wanted it in a form where it wasn't illiquid for 10 years like a normal fund, where the investors could leave whenever they want with a few years head start or a few years runway to get going. But then the investors could stay as long as they want and leave whenever they want. So that was the ultimate premise. 

And so we launched it in 2020. We actually launched it when the pandemic hit, when the lockdown started. In part because I was worried about how the lack of healthcare in Africa was going to deal with this pandemic, which turned out, we were all wrong. Africa turned out great in the pandemic for unknown reasons. But nonetheless, that was the impetus to get it funded and get it going. And here we are not quite five years later, five years from when I first decided to do this, recovering from COVID in March, 2020, but not quite five years from when it got incorporated and up and running. And all of the dreams we had back then have come true. So it did in fact work.

Todd Manwaring - Right. So really a focus, there's a huge number of people in Africa who are involved in agriculture. Some 60 percent, 70 percent are involved in subsistence farming. And you're working with organizations who are the small and medium enterprises working in those food chains, bringing food to Africans, connecting that kind of atmosphere. Does that sound right?

Luni Libes - Fledge discovered in its work, the first native African company we invested in was in 2014. And then we invited more in 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20. The model that most of our companies use in Africa eats is, buy from existing smallholder farmers. So of all the, I keep saying 1.4 billion people, half are kids, half are 19 or under. Of the adults, the vast majority are farmers. Nobody really has a good number. It's somewhere between 70 and 85%. So if you picked a random African, you would have a farmer in front of you. They would be farming about an acre in some countries less, some countries slightly more, but about an acre. And they would be feeding their family off that acre and some portion of it growing something that had a cash income. 

So we don't replace any of that. We just buy their food. So we invest in companies that buy food from those farmers, do a little processing, do a little sorting, do a little training to make the yields higher, and then sell to retailers. And so this is a win-win-win. So we literally get rid of poverty because we're paying farmers to be farmers. Their income has become a median income for their country. So that's rural middle class, not urban middle class. And so they're no longer poor.

We take ownership of that food and we don't lose it on the way to market. We lose a very small percentage. So we're creating a better flow of food, higher quality food to the cities. And that's generally the flow at the moment. And so that lowers the amount of imports needed in Africa and increases the flow of food and therefore lowers prices. And so we're solving hunger indirectly in that manner. 

And we do this with businesses that make money doing this model. So they have been scaling up and we should talk about how fast they scale up. But they do so as profitable companies. So everybody wins.

Todd Manwaring - Tell us about that, that win-win-win and the kind of scaling that is occurring. How fast does that happen with these organizations?

Luni Libes - The first company we invested in was a year old. They did $100,000 in 2013, the year before. So this is back in 2014. And if we knew the rest of the companies in the Africa Eats portfolio then, which we didn't, but if we had a time machine, it could go back and, I don't know if WhatsApp existed yet, and phone them up, text them up, and say, how big were your revenues back then? We know now that the total revenues of all the companies in 2014 was $600,000. That of the 23 that are in the portfolio, now only like six or seven existed. Total revenues was $600,000 back then. 2024, last year, 11 years later, $44 million in revenues. Right? So that's an annual average growth rate of 55%. 

But more to the point, if we go back to the poverty piece, well, if our companies earned 44 million in revenues, then they handed somewhere around $30 million of that to the farmers. That's $30 million of income the farmers wouldn't have had.

Todd Manwaring - Less food waste as you said, better structure, getting it to the cities and really helping everyone. I understand that part of your approach here comes from this book that you've written called Berkshire Africa. Tell us a little bit about that approach, it seems like, and there's the book. Help us understand, I mean, because you talk about this great scale that's occurred.

Luni Libes - Here's the book.

Todd Manwaring - But you're doing it in many ways in a slightly different approach, a Berkshire approach. Describe what that means.

Luni Libes - All right, so I hinted upon this earlier. The normal way this has been done for 50, 60 years is a venture capital model. So raise money from institutions and high net worth people, lock it up for 10 years, make investments. The investees have to then get acquired or go public within 10 years so that everybody gets paid back. And that's been going on in California for 60 years.

We're not following that model for many reasons. Biggest reason is there are no exits in Africa. They're very, very rare. Acquisitions don't really happen. IPOs are rare. We'll talk about that soon. And the other one is that the entrepreneurs we're working with don't want to sell their companies in the next 10 years. They want to build incredibly large regional companies. So even if we wanted to sell them, it doesn't matter. They don't want to sell their companies. 

So we looked around for some other model to pull from. And there's another 60 year old model out there that's doing even better than the VCs, which is Berkshire Hathaway. Warren Buffett's company, Buffett and Munger's company that they bought back in the 60s. They didn't start it, but they turned it into what it is today. It's the seventh most valuable public company in the United States. The only companies more valuable than it are the big tech companies, Apple, Google, Amazon, Nvidia and so forth. 

No bank is more valuable than them. No oil company in the US is more valuable than the only oil company in the world more valuable than is Saudi Aramco. They're eighth in the world in public companies. And what do they do? Well, they invest in companies. They buy all our parts of companies and they let them run. Warren Buffett loves to explain what he does. He explains it every year at his shareholder meeting. He's written a letter to shareholders every year since 1959 explaining what he does.

And yet there are no copycats of Berkshire Hathaway until us. We took his lessons, the most important of which is if you like a company and you found it and you bought it, why would you sell it? Just hold it forever. So it's in the news when Berkshire sells something because they rarely sell things. 

And so our intent is that we're owning our companies in Africa Eats Forever for the next 100, 200 years. And some of them might get acquired, but you know, that's not our intent. And so we also took the playbook that, well, we're not hiding anything. In fact, we want copycats. We think this is a great model. So we put it all in a book. Like, again, it's not that thick a book. We wrote down the playbook so that anybody who wants to do this, either in food and ag or in tech, ag tech or fintech or healthcare or energy, yeah, it also works for that and the playbook is here for anyone to read. Anywhere in the world.

Todd Manwaring - And do you sense this kind of this more patient approach to capital improves the outputs, the outcomes of those organizations as well as keeps them, just like you said, helps them to grow, continue to grow and to become the organizations they're trying to be?

Luni Libes - Yeah, but it's not really the patience. It's the attitude and the outlook that these are our companies. We're going to own them forever. So we don't do any decisions that are just short-term fattening the goose. We're making decisions with the founders to create great companies that will last for the next century. And so we believe that's why our companies are growing at this rate they're growing. It means we'll make decisions as investors will make decisions with these companies that help them that might hurt us in the short term, might cost us money in the short term, but help them in the long term, well, we can afford to do that because we're not returning capital to investors next year or in two years or in eight years or anything. We're here for the next hundred years as well. So we make better decisions together, that way.

Todd Manwaring - And are you still providing support like you did with Fledge? Are the organizations still getting mentoring? Before the podcast started, you mentioned that you're going to be going over, meeting with a lot of these companies and assisting with connections for them and for other groups. What does that look like?

Luni Libes - Yeah, the way we usually describe Africa Eats is that it's one cup venture capital. We don't follow the whole venture capital model, but we took parts of venture capital. It's one cup venture capital. It's two cups business accelerator, but not startup business accelerator, growth stage business accelerator. And I can't name another one. So we're kind of making up that space as we go along. We spend a lot of time hand-holing these companies and providing advice and mentorship and guidance.

And then it's a teaspoon of Berkshire Hathaway, or maybe it's a heaping tablespoon of Berkshire Hathaway. So yeah, we are not the normal investors who just write checks and get an annual report. And so next month, we will be flying them all to Nairobi as we do every year. There's a public day. Anyone who wants to come and see these companies, let me know. It's April 30th. And then we'll have two internal days. So kind of an internal conference. And at that conference, most of the time will be spent around round tables on topics that the investees are choosing and they're discussing it amongst themselves. There's no outsiders telling them what the right answer is. They are sharing their own challenges and their own solutions with each other. And that's one of the secrets of how we grow these companies so fast is they're not alone. They're in a network of support. And that support isn't just HQ, that support is the entire collection of founders and managers.

Todd Manwaring - Right. That makes perfect sense. And then and then late last year, this is where we started getting connected. One of our impact investors saw the announcement about Africa Eats being on the Mauritius Stock Exchange. Ended up happening, I believe, in December last year, 2024. Help us understand why a stock exchange, a lot of impact investing does just happen with direct debt placements or equity placements to separate organizations like you were mentioning a bit earlier. Now you have Africa Eats. It's more of a pan-Africa in multiple countries working with multiple groups. Help us understand the decision to be on the stock exchange and how that works into what you're trying to create.

Luni Libes - Okay, so there's multiple parts to that. The first one is, again, going back to Africa Eats itself. We're not a fund, we don't have a timeline, but we need a way for our investors to cash out when they feel like leaving. So we always promise, back when we were just a paper plan, that we would be public and liquid, and we would let our investors leave whenever they want. So that is now true as of December 3rd, 2024. And some of them have. Some of the Fledge investors all got shares of Africa Eats. Some of them decided that that's nice. I'll take my winnings and I'll go home. But that's not all we did on December 3rd. We also listed two other companies. So we listed Elite Meat and Zueto Holdings, which are parent companies of Paniel Meat Processing and Zueto Enterprises. And they don't operate in Mauritius. They operate in Malawi and Rwanda. 

And so we took them on this journey with us because, well, we wanted to see if the capital markets would fund fast-growing profitable SMEs. So we actually did a project with the Stock Exchange of Mauritius to create a segment specifically for fast-growing profitable SMEs. And we did road shows and we talked to the public equity investors, which is a different group of people than the private equity investors. And it turns out that, yes, at least in small amounts, in 2024, the answer was yes, they would fund these companies. They provided more money than either company had ever seen in their history of their company. It's still, for public equities, it's a tiny bit of money. For the SMEs, it was a large sum of money. We'll be bringing more companies to this segment every year. And just be clear, it's the real part of the stock market. It's not off in a corner. They are on the main stock market and in a segment.

And so the general idea is by the time we get to let's just call it 2030 again slow patient work here by the time we get to 2030 we should have 10 ish 12 ish companies listed on this segment and hopefully others have followed as well and the rules to be on the segment is you have to be growing fast and profitable. So by 2030 we should be able to go to every foreign investor in the public markets anywhere in the world and say, well, you're missing out. There is a group of companies that are all listed and have been listed for years. Here's their share price. And look, they've gone up and they've gone up because they growing at 25, 30, 40, 50 percent year over year. And they're consistently profitable. There's nothing you could invest in in your home market that grows like this. You should be putting money in this group of companies here. So we think in the long run that will attract a large stream of capital to these SMEs. And we think not just our companies, but others will follow and benefit from this as well.

Todd Manwaring - Right. Is that part of what's next for this model is really kind of this groundbreaking approach? We're doing this. It's working for Africa Eats. It's working for these two other organizations. And this is a way other impact investing firms, others can bring capital to Africa and to other locations. I mean, what's your sense?

Luni Libes - It's a tool. So again, I'll go back to there's 1.4 billion Africans, almost all are subsistence farmers. There's plenty of food grown on the continent, but so much gets lost on the way to market that pretty much every country is a net importer of food. We can fix all of that, but it's going to take an enormous amount of capital for us to actually solve those problems. And not just us, like us and everyone else working in the space  to solve those problems, we need billions of dollars. And there just aren't billions of dollars in the private equity and private debt space. There isn't billions of dollars in philanthropy going into this space. So we just said, well, where can we find billions of dollars? Well, the stock market has trillions of dollars. So what can we do now in, well, then in 2024, what can we do in 2025 and six and seven and eight to prove to the stock market and the capital market investors that this is worth investing in. So we're just taking a few baby steps now and expecting that in the 2030s that there'll be that flow of billions of dollars.

Todd Manwaring - I appreciate you taking the time to help us understand Africa Eats, what it is, its approach. The fact that you've been able to get this on the stock exchange, I think is something that's just quite interesting to many of our impact investors. 

I have one last question for you. This is something we ask everybody who's on our podcast. And what I'd like you to do is give us a perspective. Tell us about a favorite book or an article or a podcast or maybe some experience that you've had that you really drew a lot of insight from that really pertains to your social impact work that you do. Is there something that's really touched you or you'd suggest for others that they ought to read this or see this?

Luni Libes - Yeah, so one that's not brand new is Capital in the 21st Century, which I read when it was fairly new. That was 13 or 14 or 15. It was a while back. And it's about 650 pages. If anyone's told you that they finished it, they're probably lying to you. It's one of those economics books. It had 500 pages of amazing analysis of income inequality and wealth inequality back 250 years and then has a terrible conclusion. So you can skip the conclusion. But this was the book that made me understand that income inequality is not the problem. It's a problem, but it's not the problem. The problem is wealth inequality. And I touched upon that before when I said, a seventh of the world owns 2 % of the wealth. Like, that's true in every country as well. You find it, you know, in the US, half of the population owns 2 % of the wealth, right, and 1 % owns half the other half, or 10 % owns the other half. This got me started on thinking about, how do we solve this problem? How could we possibly solve this enormous wealth inequality, and how do we do it as investors, not as philanthropists, because again, philanthropy doesn't have enough money. So how do we solve it by investing in places where there isn't wealth to go create it without necessarily sucking the wealth out of those areas. 

So one more thing I'll point out about this structure I'm using is we're raising capital primarily from US and Europe, some from Africa, but primarily US and Europe. We're investing it in African companies. And then when those investors want out, they sell on the stock market to other investors. We don't extract any money from our companies. We're just adding value to those companies. And so this is an implementation of this learning I had. And it all started with capital in the 21st century.

Todd Manwaring - That's a great example. Perfect book. I think you're right that most people have definitely not read every word of, but gleaned some things from. Thank you, Luni Libes, for being here with us. We're grateful for your experience, for your perspectives and your time helping us understand more about Africa Eats. We'll see you next time.

Luni Libes - All right, thank you.

Tanner Mills - In this next segment, we'll highlight Africa Eats as they are the impact opportunity that we'll be sharing. Their mission is to reduce hunger and eliminate poverty across Africa by investing in for-profit solutions that really seek to improve the supply chain of agriculture in Africa. And as you've heard today, Africa Eats is listed currently on the Mauritius Stock Exchange and their ticker symbol right now is eats.n000.

You can see this stock price just by searching up Africa Eats stock price on Google. As a publicly traded company, quarterly reports as well as any information or company updates are actually available to you to read and to look up. These are available on the Stock Exchange of Mauritius website and we'll include a link to that in the description.

Brokerage fees associated with any investments in Africa Eats at this time are most easily absorbed when the investments are above about $5,000. So we recommend amounts above that, but there is no minimum. At UI Charitable Advisors, we have a registered trading account with the stock exchange of Mauritius. University Impacts DAF allows for easy impact investments into Africa Eats and other organizations just like this.

So if you're interested in making an investment in Africa Eats or finding out what other opportunities we have available, you can email us at impact at uicharitable.org for more information.

Jaxson Thomas - Before we wrap up, I want to turn to our member questions in a new segment called the Impact Inbox. Every episode will feature one question from our members and answer it here on the podcast. Today's question is, “I found a cause I really care about and an organization I feel is doing great work. What is the best way to fund this organization? Which will be better? A grant, a loan, or an equity investment?”

This is a really great question and it's one we get asked a lot. People are concerned about using the right financial tool, and there are lot of financial tools we can use to support social impact organizations. The way we think about it at UI Charitable Advisors and the Impact Innovation Group is that there are two primary types of organizations. There are nonprofits and there are for-profit companies, both trying to accomplish a social good or solve a social problem. Nonprofit companies are typically supported through grants and loans, while for-profit companies can be supported through grant loans, and equity. Grants are more about building capacity. 

Grants are great tools for organizations that are just starting out. They're piloting a program. They're still learning how to make a difference and how to be effective and impactful. While loans or equity investments are more about growth, they're for organizations that have really figured it out. They're looking to expand into a new area, into a new country, and they already have a proven model.

It's less about picking the exact financial tool that you want to use and more about aligning with the organization and understanding where they're at, understanding their space, their financial situation, and their goals. The best way to do that is just to talk to the organization, find out where they're at, and then you can better align your goals with them and move forward together. Have a question like this? Reach out to us. We'd love to answer it here on the podcast. You can submit a question by emailing us at impact@uichairable.org. or visiting our website, iig.uicharitable.org.

Tanner Mills - Thank you to everyone for joining us for this episode of the Impact Innovation Group podcast. We hope that today was an informative experience learning about Africa Eats and agriculture in Africa and how their innovative model of supporting the supply chain in agriculture is really starting to transform people's lives and bring them out of poverty. To continue this conversation, we invite you to visit our website again at iig.uicharitable.org. If you have comments or questions, email us at impact at uicharitable.org.

We'll see you next time.

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