Acumen invests in cold chain company SokoFresh

Acumen has invested in SokoFresh, which provides smallholder farmers in East Africa with cold-storage solutions and market access to reduce post-harvest losses and guarantee demand for produce.

This is Acumen’s first new investment through its latest energy initiative, PEII+, which is designed to invest early-stage capital in energy businesses that are improving the livelihoods of smallholder farmers and micro-entrepreneurs in India, East Africa and West Africa.

Africa’s smallholder farmers lose millions of kilograms worth of produce to post-harvest losses every year. This creates an urgency to sell the food quickly once matured, which exposes farmers to exploitation from brokers. About 30-40% of horticultural produce in sub-Saharan Africa does not make it to market, hindered by informal and unreliable supply chains. Without a place to store it, produce will rot, leaving farmers with less quality produce to sell and resulting in vast quantities of food going to waste.

SokoFresh provides reliable and efficient solar-powered cold-storage solutions to support the East Africa horticultural sector, disrupting the value chain by structuring produce aggregation, upgrading the logistics process, and decentralising cold-chain access. By finding buyers – both domestic and export-processing – through its market linkage platform, SokoFresh eliminates numerous middlemen and increases farmer income.

“With Acumen’s support, we can empower more farmers in Kenya and beyond to access fair and transparent markets, increase food security, and ultimately boost their incomes,” says SokoFresh CEO Denis Karema. “We’re thrilled to be working with a partner that shares our mission of using climate-smart solutions to create a sustainable and equitable food system.”

“Acumen is proud to back Sokofresh and their use of renewable energy to combat first-mile post-harvest losses, and improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers,” said Shiru Mwangi, director at Acumen East Africa. “This investment highlights our dedication to support innovations that deliver direct impact to smallholder farmers.”