CASA research launched at AGRF Deal Room

CASA will host its first Global Agribusiness Investor Summit at this year’s African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) Virtual Summit which will take place on September 7, 2020, within the framework of AGRFs Deal Room. 

This year’s inaugural summit focuses on three of CASA’s ground-breaking research reports:

Effectiveness of agri-business incubation in emerging markets

Agri-business incubators play an important role in developing technology and value chains that let small agricultural businesses thrive in developing countries and emerging markets. However, scant evidence has been collected on the effectiveness of such interventions at generating additional investments in the sector. This paper remedies this. The research aims to: i) identify examples of incubators of small and medium enterprises (SME) that have successfully catalysed investment into the agricultural sector over the last 10 years; ii) identify and analyse types of agribusiness incubators; and iii) provide evidence on the results and impact of the different incubation models and, where applicable and information is available, on gendered impacts.

ICTs for improving investment readiness of small and medium agribusinesses

This study analyses the factors behind successful deployment of mobile technologies to improve agribusiness productivity and investment readiness. It aims to analyse agricultural value-added services (agri-VAS) that have SME agribusinesses as their main clients, as they are more likely to positively impact the investment readiness of SME agribusinesses than agri-VAS with smallholder farmers as their only clients, which are also the most evaluated type of agri-VAS.

Bridging demand and supply of private investment capital for small and medium agribusinesses 

This study is motivated by an apparent contradiction: suppliers of capital report a lack of investible opportunities in Africa, while demanders of capital cannot find willing partners to provide capital to them.  In spite of significant amounts of private capital being available for investment worldwide, institutional and impact investors have found it difficult to mobilise large amounts of private investment for agribusiness opportunities in Africa. This study identifies strategies for development and impact-investment actors to bridge the gap between the risk-reward demands (or adjusted risk-returns) of investment capital and the available supply of agri-businesses for investment. The study assesses whether what is needed is different forms of capital; greater work to provide the pre-conditions for private investment in agri-food systems; or both of these.The resulting analysis addresses the needs and interests of both investors and investment-support stakeholders.