Food-Techfor ResilienceIn East Africa

East Africa is one of the world's fastest-growing regions, expanding at 5–6% GDP growth per year. It is a market of extraordinary momentum, and one still shaped by challenges deep enough to build ventures around.

Those resilience challenges are real, and they are compounding. Since the 1970s, severe droughts across the region have tripled and extreme floods have risen more than tenfold, locking agriculture — which employs over 60% of East Africa's workforce — into a cycle of deepening climate volatility. Up to 40–50% of fruits and vegetables spoil before they reach consumers, driven by gaps in storage, cold chains, and rural infrastructure.

The infrastructure gaps run deeper still. Across Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania alone, more than 82 million people live without reliable electricity and over 60 million without access to clean drinking water — most of them smallholder farmers already on the front line of every climate shock. Large-scale infrastructure building is slow and costly, leaving the communities that need it most without a foundation to grow on.

Capital is scarce where it counts too: close to 70% of MSMEs across the three countries cannot access the formal financing they need — a shortfall of roughly $35 billion across Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Without capital to invest, absorb shocks, or scale, even strong businesses stay fragile.