AECF

Who We Are

The Africa Enterprise Challenge Fund (AECF) is a development institution that supports businesses to innovate, create jobs, leverage investments and markets in an effort to create resilience and sustainable incomes in rural and marginalized communities in Africa. Launched in 2008, the AECF has mobilized over US$ 356 million to date, leveraging more than US$ 658 million in matching capital and improving the lives of more than 16 million people in 2017 alone through jobs and increased household incomes. AECF has so far supported 268 companies in 26 countries in sub-Saharan Africa across 40 value chains in our focal sectors of agribusiness and renewable energy.

In the new 2018-2020 strategy, our goal is to “double our impact in half the time”. To achieve this, we will continue to focus on the agribusiness and renewable energy sectors, increase support to climate-smart technologies, refine our challenge model, expand regional presence, deepen the focus on gender, youth and employment by expanding our products and partnership approach to better meet our investees’ current needs; and ensure they rapidly scale and transition to external financing and sustainability thereby attaining our vision of ‘A Prosperous and Enterprising Rural Africa’

Areas of Investment

The AECF targets investments in the following sectors:

• Agriculture and agribusiness
• Renewable energy and adaptations to climate change
• Rural financial services and communications systems that support the two sectors

AECF