Inside the Ag Safari Summit

Hey, Hannatu and Timi here 👋

We are officially 6 months into planting Ag Safari!

Since we launched in September 2025, we have grown this platform to 2,500 leaders tracking African agriculture.  

We’ve written to you 40 times. Half of those stories were original deep dives into the people and products building critical solutions for the continent’s food systems.

We covered how Emata is unlocking loans for local farmers locked out of traditional credit systems. 

And GenePlus’s and SpaceAI’s answers to how do we build better cows?

Overall, these stories helped Ag Safari reach 250,000 people in its first five months. People are watching, we’ve got eyes on us. 

At Tech Safari, we like to say we turn attention into action and connect the people behind Africa’s innovation story. 

We often do this by using events and media to create ventures that bring people together. And we’ve hosted 20,000 of you across 15+ countries at these events, and we reach 12 million of you annually on our media platforms. 

We want to have the same impact in African agriculture: build a platform that connects the people building agricultural solutions. 

And so, together with our partner SAIS, we organised the Ag Safari Summit!

On Monday, February 9, 2026, we brought 150 stakeholders in agriculture together in Nairobi, Kenya.

But we ditched the usual conference playbook. No panels. No keynote monologues. No town halls.

Instead, we hosted simple, collaborative conversations where every attendee was a speaker.

Joachim Westerveld (CEO of BioFoods) and Ramah Madiba (CEO of Space AI) sat with 20 stakeholders to explore how processors and farmers can milk the opportunities in the African dairy industry. 

Investors like Luni Libes (CEO of Africa Eats) and Melanie Keita (Co-Founder and CEO of Melanin Kapital) were part of roundtable conversations on how local agribusinesses can secure the right capital for sustainable growth.

For those who wanted to talk about growth, Jehiel Oliver (Founder, Hello Tractor) and Deborah Gael (Co-Founder and COO, Koolboks) shared their experiences scaling agribusinesses in Africa. 

And our friends at Briter gave us an exclusive sneak peek into the data driving their upcoming Agtech in Africa 2025 report.

If you’re wondering why you didn’t get an invite to Nairobi, it’s because we kept it intentionally intimate. 

To get past the fluff and have real, unfiltered conversations about the future of food, we needed a curated room, not a massive conference hall.

But while the doors were closed, the insights aren't. 

We wanted to bring the best of these roundtables straight to your inbox.

Here is a snapshot of the biggest takeaways from the ground at Ag Safari Summit 2026:

Seyi Alabi has spent years figuring out how to reach farmers who can't access the internet. 

His company Crop2Cash provides financial services to rural farmers, and the insight that emerged from his session on rural adoption was clear. 

USSD remains the most powerful entry point for financial inclusion in rural areas where feature phones dominate, and internet access is limited. 

By designing with accessibility at the core, Crop2Cash not only enables offline transactions but also generates farmer data profiles that unlock access to financing. 

Goitseone Malatsi from Brastorne echoed this in the same session. 

The mistake most agtech companies make is building for Nairobi when they need to build for Nyeri. 

Rural adoption isn't about better features; it's about zero-friction access. Sophistication loses to simplicity every single time.

Lucy Kimani from Gatsby Africa and Clinton Obura, founder of Samaking, led a session that dove deep into aquaculture. 

Africa controls 30,000 miles of coastal shoreline. 

Most of it sits underutilised while global seafood demand explodes. 

The continent produces less than 2% of global aquaculture output despite having ideal conditions. 

Victory Farms in Kenya raised $35 million, which is the largest aquaculture deal in African history. But one deal doesn't make a sector. 

Most fish farming ventures struggle to access capital beyond small grants. 

And the room agreed: if fundamentals like cold storage, feed mills and processing facilities are solved, Africa could capture a large chunk of the $250 billion global seafood market within a decade.

Melanie Keita from Melanin Kapital and Richard Midikira from Aceli Africa focused their session on a simple truth. 

Farmers can't wait 90 days for payment. 

That's not how agricultural cash flow works. 

They need money immediately after harvest to survive until the next season. Working capital unlocks growth faster than equity rounds ever could. 

Local currency loans eliminate the forex risk that has killed many agribusinesses. 

So short-term, high-frequency lending fits agricultural cycles better than traditional term loans. 

The companies solving this use digital records to extend credit rapidly based on transaction history. Revenue-based repayment means loans adjust to actual farm output. 

In Africa, debt capital is cultural. Lending practices differ across African markets because culture, religion, and social rhythms shape demand. 

Understanding these nuances is critical when thinking about funding models.

Luni Libes has watched the African agtech funding landscape shift dramatically. 

As CEO of AfricaEats, he's been vocal about how venture capital doesn't fit agtech timelines. 

During the session on sustainable growth capital with agritech investor Muthoni Wachira, the data told a stark story. 

AgTech funding crashed 65% after 2022. 

Equity fell even harder, down 76% to just $80 million in 2025. 

Meanwhile, debt grew to $52 million and grants hit $13 million. 

The funding structure completely shifted. 

Grants now account for 58% of all deals, up from 38% in 2022. 

This isn't temporary, it's structural. The sector needs revenue-based financing, concessional debt, and blended structures. 

As one founder in the room put it, not all capital in Africa comes in headline VC funding rounds. 

Small grants and catalytic funding can reveal a lot. 

How founders extend runway, experiment, and unlock customers with limited resources signals how they might steward larger investments.

Terrence Usibe, the CFO of ColdHubs knows the post-harvest problem intimately. 

His company has deployed solar-powered walk-in cold rooms across Nigeria using a pay-as-you-store model. 

During his session with Claire van Enk, CEO of Farm to Feed, he highlighted the operational challenges around storage, temperature control, and reliable transportation. 

About 40% of African produce never reaches consumers. 

It rots in fields, spoils in transit, or degrades in storage. 

Post-harvest funding jumped 56% in 2025, reaching $53 million. But most deals stayed under $2 million. This is far below what's needed for real infrastructure. 

The companies raising serious capital focus on asset-heavy models: refrigerated transport, solar-powered cold rooms, and processing facilities. 

Solving post-harvest requires patient capital willing to fund long-payback physical assets.

Joachim Westerveld runs Bio Foods, one of the largest dairy processors operating across Africa. 

In his session with Ramah Madiba of SpaceAI, they discussed the African dairy industry. 

One of the major insights was that African dairy farmers operate blindly on margins. 

They don't know true feed costs, optimal milk yields, or fair market prices. 

This information asymmetry keeps smallholders permanently disadvantaged. 

Ramah's company SpaceAI, is building AI-powered herd monitoring that can track health, predict output, and flag problems early.

But as both speakers emphasised, technology alone won't fix broken market structures. 

Farmers need access to premium buyers who reward quality. Without transparent pricing and a guaranteed offtake, even the best data becomes useless. 

The dairy sector needs both better information and better markets working together.

The Ag Safari Summit ended with a hard look at the macro picture and the future of agriculture in Africa.

In January, the Kenyan tech community was rocked by the shutdown of Koko Networks, the cleantech company that served over 1.5 million households and employed 700 people.

The collapse immediately brought the future of carbon credits in Kenya, and the continent at large, into question. 

But Samir Ibrahim, Co-Founder and CEO of SunCulture, brought the room back down to earth with a different perspective.

In his closing roundtable, Samir noted that the Koko Networks shutdown is not a reflection of the viability of carbon credits. Instead, it’s a glaring regulatory issue.

Kenya actually has the legal frameworks for carbon markets in place. The problem is execution. 

Getting the necessary government approvals takes time, creating the kind of friction and delays that can choke out even the most well-capitalised companies.

And Samir would know. SunCulture relies on carbon revenues to subsidise the cost of its solar irrigation pumps for smallholder farmers. 

They have navigated these exact same waters, with some regulatory approvals taking almost two years to come through.

The bottom line? The opportunity in climate and agtech is massive, but innovators can't outpace slow government machinery. 

For the continent to truly capitalise on carbon markets and agricultural innovation, policymakers need to match the speed of the founders building the solutions.

Despite the regulatory hurdles, the consensus in the room was clear: the playbook is being rewritten, and the builders are ready.

What stood out most for us at the Ag Safari Summit wasn’t any single insight. 

It was the quality of people in the room, willing to have honest, sometimes uncomfortable conversations about what’s actually working and what isn’t. 

Africa’s food systems aren’t broken because of a lack of ideas. 

They’re held back by infrastructure gaps, misaligned capital and policy environments that haven’t kept pace with the ambitions of the founders building in the space.

The conversations at AgSafari exist precisely to close that gap.

And we’re looking forward to hosting more of these intimate conversations that push the ecosystem forward.

If you attended, what was your favourite conversation? If you didn’t, what would you like us to discuss in the next summit?

👉🏾Tell us here.

Cheers,