Nutrition-Informed Agrifood Business Growth: Why Africa’s Next Business and Development Advantage Starts on the Plate

Africa's food future will not be secured by producing more food alone. That is no longer enough. The bigger task is building agrifood businesses that can make safe, nutritious, affordable, desirable, and climate-resilient food available at scale. This is where nutrition-informed agrifood business growth stops being a public health talking point and becomes a serious business, investment, and development agenda.

For too long, nutrition has been treated as a public health issue sitting outside the core business conversation. Africa's next generation of agrifood businesses must sit at the intersection of public health, food security, economic growth, environmental sustainability, and private investment. That intersection is the real opportunity.

The pressure on Africa's food systems is intensifying, and it carries a direct cost to the broader economy. In 2024, over 307 million people in Africa were chronically undernourished, more than one in five people on the continent. Africa is projected to account for nearly 60 percent of the world's chronically undernourished people by 2030 if current trends continue, according to the UN's State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report. Globally, the number of people unable to afford a healthy diet stood at 2.6 billion in 2024, with Africa bearing a disproportionate share of that burden.

Africa's food import bill reflects the same pressure. Sub-Saharan Africa's food import bill reached $62.8 billion in 2024 and was projected to hit $65 billion by the end of 2025, a fourth-percent increase, according to FAO's Food Outlook report, driven by cereals, oils, and fish that domestic food systems are not producing competitively. At the same time, Africa's agribusiness sector is projected to become a trillion-dollar market by 2030, driven by population growth, urbanization, and rising demand for convenient foods. Former African Development Bank President Dr Akinwumi Adesina put it plainly at the World Food Prize Foundation's Norman E. Borlaug Dialogue in 2023: do not overlook Africa's trillion-dollar food and agribusiness sector.

Nutrition-informed agrifood growth means building food businesses that are commercially strong and intentionally aligned with better nutrition outcomes. It does not mean turning every business into a health charity. It means asking better business questions.

An agrifood MSME processing complementary foods, fortified staples, dried vegetables, dairy, legumes, nuts, or ready-to-cook foods can compete on more than price. It can compete on trust, quality, safety, nutritional value, and relevance to real household needs. That is a stronger growth path.

Take a food processor, for example. When that business gets portion sizes right, strengthens ingredient quality, adds clear labelling, improves affordability, or considers fortification where appropriate, it is not only improving the health value of the product. It is building a more credible business. That business becomes easier for families to trust, easier for regulators to assess, and easier for schools, hospitals, retailers, development partners, and investors to consider.

Women are central to this agenda. In Sub-Saharan Africa, approximately 76 percent of working women are employed in agrifood systems, and women make up 49 percent of the entire agrifood workforce. Yet more than 90 percent of employed women in the sector work informally, without recognition, adequate finance, or institutional support, according to the same FAO, NRI, and AWARD report. Nutrition-informed growth that does not deliberately include women-led SMEs will miss its most important engine.

Africa still carries a heavy burden of undernutrition, micronutrient deficiencies, and diet-related non-communicable diseases. Globally, 150.2 million children under five were stunted in 2024, 42.8 million were wasted, and 35.5 million were overweight, according to WHO's Joint Child Malnutrition Estimates.

This double burden is becoming more visible across African countries. Undernutrition has not disappeared, yet non-communicable diseases are rising sharply: NCDs accounted for 37 percent of all deaths in the WHO African region in 2019, up from 24 percent in 2000, with cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancers leading the burden.

This means the private food sector is now part of the public health equation, whether it publicly declares that role or not. Food businesses influence what people see, desire, buy, cook, and consume daily. They shape food environments through pricing, product formulation, labelling, marketing, and retail presence.

But public health actors must shift too. It is not enough to issue guidelines and expect markets to change. Governments, donors, and technical partners need to work with agrifood SMEs in practical ways: supporting reformulation, food safety systems, fortification, and labelling compliance. Nutrition outcomes will not improve at scale if the businesses producing nutritious food remain small, undercapitalized, and poorly supported.

Agrifood SMEs make up around 85 percent of the private sector volume in Africa's agrifood value chains. They buy from farmers, create jobs, stimulate packaging industries, and keep value in local economies. When they process nutritious food well, they do even more.

Consider a processor that reduces tomato loss through basic value addition. They are not just selling paste. They are protecting farmer income, stabilizing supply, reducing waste, improving household food access, and potentially easing pressure on costly imports. Agrifood systems account for about one-third of global human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, and 13.2 percent of food is lost after harvest and before retail, with a further 19 percent wasted at retail, food service, and household levels. Post-harvest management, processing, cold chain investment, and local sourcing are therefore food system levers, not just operational choices.

Under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), intra-African agricultural trade is projected to increase significantly by 2030 as tariff barriers come down. Agrifood MSMEs that build credible nutrition claims, food safety systems, and scalable supply chains now are best positioned to capture those regional markets as they open.

The investment conversation is changing. Nutrition is emerging more clearly as an investment lens, with initiatives like the Access to Nutrition Initiative's Impact Investing for Nutrition project explicitly designed to unlock capital for MSMEs producing healthier foods in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Yet the financing gap is severe. An estimated $65 to $75 billion in annual credit demand from agrifood MSMEs in Sub-Saharan Africa goes unmet, with commercial banks supplying only around 11 percent of what is needed. Some businesses are too large for micro-finance while MSMEs are small, risky, or informal for commercial bank lending, trapped in what is widely called “the missing middle”.

This is precisely where nutrition-informed growth becomes an investment readiness strategy. An agrifood MSME that can show strong sales, responsible sourcing, product quality, nutrition relevance, food safety compliance, and clear evidence of who it reaches will be better positioned for blended finance, patient capital, and commercial investment. Impact has to be designed into the business model, not bolted on after the business plan is written.

At Impacter Solutions, we work with agrifood businesses, investors, donors, and public institutions to build nutrition-informed, commercially sustainable food systems across Africa, through business diagnostics, strategy, investment readiness support, and program design for agrifood MSMEs, operating at the intersection of nutrition, food security, and commercial growth.

Nutrition-informed growth is not an extra burden. It is a smarter way to build products that people need, markets can trust, and buyers can take seriously. It is a serious growth pathway for African SMEs, a public health strategy for governments, a stronger programming lens for donors, and a credible investment opportunity for impact investors. The future of African food systems will be shaped by the businesses that can feed people well, grow profitably, create jobs, reduce waste, protect trust, and compete in increasingly demanding markets.

That is where the work must go next, and it is the space we are committed to strengthening.