Global supply chain weakness and urbanisation trends are being disproportionately felt in the most rural parts of Africa. Yet those areas both offer opportunities for high-impact investment, and expose the need to rethink aid provision.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has reminded us how closely linked global supply chains are, creating stress for the world’s poor by hindering efforts to fight poverty, food insecurity, and famine. This is taking a hefty toll on many African countries. To make matters worse, an issue specifically related to the African continent deserves attention: the design of mainstream rural development. Additionally, global price inflation is having a proportionally higher impact on non-resilient households in regions such as Africa, where there are no shock absorbers in place.

All of these factors deepen the food security issue in the African countries, especially where important food-producing smallholder farmers are not receiving the right kind of support at the right time.

In our upcoming event, we will discuss challenges of traditional aid models, the need to convert to investment driven developments, role of impact investing, securing returns and scaling up solutions in Africa with the below distinguished speakers:

Adrian Raisbeck, Founder & CEO of mbora

Barry Palte, Chairman of EQ Capital Partners

Paul Smith, CFA, Founder at SustainFinance and Former President of CFA Institute

Kubra Koldemir, Author at SustainFinance and Researcher Argüden Governance Academy

On the south eastern shore of Lake Malawi, a project called mbora is proving itself an alternative to aid dependency in rural African communities, says project founder Adrian Raisbeck.