AlphaTalents Africa launches impact investment vehicle in Mauritius with focus on African agribusiness sector

• AlphaTalents Africa (ATA) is an impact investment company that offers a unique model of patient capital and impact-centric investment to African agribusinesses
• ATA was founded by Nestlé veteran Roland Decorvet, who has 31 years of experience in the agri-food industry across emerging markets in Asia and Africa

Mauritius, 17 October 2022 – AlphaTalents Africa (“ATA”), a purpose-driven investment company supporting the creation and growth of profitable, sustainable, and impact-centric agribusiness ecosystems in Africa, is pleased to announce that it has launched an investment vehicle based in Mauritius to meet the needs of the African agri-food industry.

With his core competency in food supply chains and his in-depth understanding of the agri-food industry in emerging markets, Nestlé veteran Roland Decorvet founded ATA to invest patient capital in companies that will help advance the pan-African agribusiness industry to the next level.

Choosing to locate his investment vehicle in Mauritius as a noted investment hub with focus on Africa, he joined forces with financial services veteran Bastien Maucet who possesses 15 years of investment experience in Europe and Africa and is a former partner at an equity fund investing in African early-stage businesses.

All in all, ATA’s team of senior food industry and investment experts at management, investment committee, and advisory levels brings to the table a combined 350 years of experience in the agri-foods industry together with an in-depth understanding of the long investment lifecycle needed to realise the sector’s true potential. They actively identify and provide support to investee companies committed to having a positive social, human, and environmental impact on the ecosystems they operate in, and that are managed by people upholding the highest standards of integrity and fairness.

Indeed, at ATA’s heart lies the mission of supporting Africans in building a sustainable and value creation-driven food industry that positively impacts their lives, their communities, and their environment. Given that Africa has 60% of the world’s unexploited arable land, yet it imports 85% of its food requirements, ATA aims to resolve this paradox by accelerating the transition of Africa’s agri-food value chain towards a sustainable and inclusive industry capable of meeting the continent’s growing food needs.

Bastien Maucet, Partner at AlphaTalents Africa, said: “The raison d’être of AlphaTalents Africa is to offer a much-needed alternative to the traditional equity investment model that is clearly not working as far as the African agribusiness sector is concerned. As a core value proposition, AlphaTalents Africa’s investment vehicle has a 20 years’ lifetime, matching the long-term funding needs of the agribusiness industry. Whereas most investment vehicles are designed to attract funds from a pre-targeted population of investors rather than to solve an actual problem, AlphaTalents Africa’s unique investment vehicle is built to address a systemic pain-point in the African agribusiness industry: The everlasting gap between the long-term funding needs of agri-food businesses and the short-term investment horizon of traditional actors of the private equity industry.”

ATA plans to raise capital primarily from European high net worth individuals, foundations and family offices sharing its vision and looking to have a positive impact in Africa while fostering a profitable agri-food industry.

Roland Decorvet, Founder and Managing Partner of AlphaTalents Africa, commented: “By bringing patient capital to the table, we seek to unlock the potential of this strategic sector with a holistic approach to agri-stakeholders that creates measurable and sustainable value across the human, social, environmental, and financial pillars of our investment model. Those four core pillars of value creation are the basis of AlphaTalents Africa’s performance measurement. Moreover, with a firmly rooted conviction that agribusiness cannot thrive in a vacuum, AlphaTalents Africa invests up to 25% of its capital in ancillary industries such as education, energy, healthcare, logistics, technology, and financial services that, in varying degrees, affect the agribusiness value chain.”

As ATA launches its operations in Mauritius, the island’s growing focus on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors augurs well for the future of this impact-centric investment vehicle. With the Mauritian Cabinet greenlighting the way for the island economy to develop an ESG Framework, such a framework would certainly serve to ease the process for investment vehicles like ATA to raise financing on the international market by providing the right comfort to global investors using ESG factors to direct their investments.

Most crucially, against the sobering backdrop of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the attendant complications in the supply chain, the World Food Programme estimates that an additional 30 million people in Africa are facing a food security crisis. It is clear then that the African agribusiness sector needs support more than ever before, as more and more livelihoods depend on its ability to feed a population facing growing threats to food security, making initiatives such as ATA the need of the hour to help the continent achieve food sufficiency for a 1.4 billion strong population.

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