Sahel Capital makes follow-on investment in West African agribusiness company
The Social Enterprise Fund for Agriculture in Africa has approved an additional $800,000 financing facility for MM LEKKER.
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Sahel Capital’s Social Enterprise Fund for Agriculture in Africa (SEFAA) has approved an additional $800,000 financing facility for MM LEKKER. This follows an initial $400,000 working capital loan earlier this year.
Benin-based MM LEKKER specialises in sourcing and selling soya beans, shea nuts, and cashew nuts to both local and international markets.
Since its inception, the company has expanded its network to over 2,500 smallholder farmers, up from approximately 1,000 farmers at the time of the initial investment.
“MM LEKKER has demonstrated tremendous progress in strengthening smallholder participation in Benin’s agricultural sector,” said Aïcha Haidara, vice president at Sahel Capital.
Ahimakin Armel Theodore, CEO of MM LEKKER, commented: “Smallholder farmers are the backbone of Benin’s agricultural landscape, yet they face persistent challenges such as limited market access, price instability, and fragmented value chains. With SEFAA’s financial support and capacity-building assistance, we have been able to strengthen our internal systems, improve our governance, and deepen our engagement with farming communities. Expanding our network to more than 2,500 farmers is a major milestone, and this new facility will enable us to scale our operations, enhance supply chain efficiency, and continue delivering better trading opportunities for our farmers.”
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Brilliant work here. The doubling of MM LEKKER's farmer network in less than a year really underscores how critical working capital is for agricultural aggregators. Most impact funds focus on the equity story but the real bottleneck in these value chains is usually short-term liquidity for procurement. What's intresting is how this facility addresses price instability at the farmgate level which dunno if folks realize is basically the #1 reason smallholders stay trapped in informl markets.