Acumen Fund Blog

Infrastructure is destiny

Wed, 20 May 2026 20:55:19 +0000

Early on the opening morning of TED2026, two drones lifted off and soared around the theater, seeking out the conference’s co-hosts through facial recognition. Later, a drone company CEO launched an autonomous drone in Tokyo live from the TED stage in Vancouver, while another drone CEO described a world where drones are omnipresent, humming across American cities as first responders, detectives, and friendly eyes in the sky.

It was all a bit surreal. I was sitting with 15 Acumen Fellows, who are building enterprises that solve some of the toughest problems on the planet. They work in the margins with communities that are still contending with the basics like access to healthy food, steady electricity, and dignified work. We’ve brought a cohort of our Fellows to TED every year for five years now. It’s inspiring every time, but never has it felt as important as this year.

The theme for this year’s conference was “All of Us” — the idea that navigating this terrifying, hopeful moment will require everyone: drone manufacturers and Acumen Fellows, AI companies and Nobel laureates like Malala Yousafzai, who opened the conference with a reminder that for millions of girls, the right to simply go to school or play a sport remains unfinished business. One speaker cited a phrase drawn from an OpenAI white paper making the case for data center investment. Infrastructure is destiny. I kept turning it over all week.

Infrastructure is destiny.

Not roads and railways, although those matter. The invisible kind of infrastructure. The algorithms that channel our attention and spending online. The drones that circle the skies without us ever knowing. The platforms, protocols, and code written by corporations that now wield the power of empires. The systems that pre-determine the shape of what’s possible before any of us sit down to make a choice.

TED2026 arrived at a strange and urgent moment. Every breakthrough at the conference came with a shadow. Drones for safety — and for surveillance. A billion biological experiments in the next four years to map RNA the way LLMs cracked language — and the civil rights questions that trail quietly behind. Agents that can now do everything a person can do on a computer — and the obvious question that raises about human agency in an agentic future.

One of the most powerful talks came from Carissa Veliz, who asserted that predictions are not facts, even though our markets and therefore our world treat them as such. Facts belong to the past. And yet we are living through a moment when the most powerful tools are being used to make the future feel inevitable — to close the conversation before it begins. The story being told about AI, about displacement, about who will benefit and who will be left behind, is not yet written. It is a choice being made, right now.

When I walk into TED with Acumen Fellows, something shifts. Their presence is its own kind of moral compass. Their presence cannot help but make you think about who is not there, because their life’s work exists within the gap between the world being imagined and the world they are building in — that gap is exactly where the moral infrastructure either gets built or doesn’t.

Niharika Jain, the founder of Broomees in India, is building the infrastructure of dignified work for domestic workers, training, verifying, and professionalizing a workforce that has historically been invisible to the formal economy. When AI is being deployed to automate the so-called “menial,” Niharika is asking the prior question: How do we make this work visible? How do we make it count? Dignity, she understands, is not a feature you add later. It is the foundation.

Willie Ng, the founder of Global Cerah in Malaysia, is turning agricultural waste into animal feed and fertilizer, reducing input costs by 40%, building a circular economy from the margins for farmers who have been traditionally excluded. He left an eight-year corporate career because he saw what was being wasted, and what was possible. His work is infrastructure in the most literal sense: the kind that feeds people, restores land, and closes loops that extractive systems leave open.

Mainak Roy, the co-founder of Simple Education Foundation in India, has spent more than a decade building the infrastructure of learning for children in government schools, training teachers, transforming classrooms, working toward 10 million children across the country. His unyielding belief guides him: one good teacher can transform a life He understands that education is not a service, itis the infrastructure of agency itself.

These three — and the thousands of Acumen Fellows like them across our global community — are the human infrastructure. They are the steel and girders of a different kind of future. They have the expertise to understand the systems they are working within, the moral imagination to see beyond them, and the stubborn, grounded belief that the people most affected by broken systems are also the ones most capable of fixing them.

“Abundance without participation feels like scarcity,” Van Jones said. The infrastructure of opportunity — who gets access, who gets to build, whose knowledge is encoded and whose is ignored — does not assemble itself. It is built, or it isn’t, through deliberate choices made by people with the vision and the will to make them.

The razor’s edge between hope and fear is real. I felt it at TED2026 more acutely than any year before. But I also felt something else: the quiet, resolute presence of builders who have looked at the world as it is and chosen to build the world as it could be. A growing force that is not succumbing to the power of prediction or presumed “inevitability” of how the world will shake out, but rather actively shaping it through grit, will power and community, and a belief that we will be okay, if we ground in our shared humanity.

Building from Nothing: How refugee-led enterprises are turning exclusion into opportunity

Acumen — Mon, 18 May 2026 12:00:00 +0000

The smoke got into everything.

It got into Solomon Bhaghabhonerano’s clothes, his food, the walls of his small home in Uganda’s Kyaka II refugee settlement. It got into his mother’s lungs, too. He remembers her coughing and coughing from the indoor fire where she cooked food and purified water.

By the time Bhaghabhonerano was old enough to understand what was happening, he was already missing school to search for firewood, trudging further from home as the forests around Kyaka II thinned and the wood grew scarce. Eventually he stopped going to school altogether for more than two years, trading his education for a resource that was making his family sick.

“I would ask myself, is this what it means to become a refugee, that you have to go through these challenges?” he says. ”For me, it created a deep pain within me, but there was nothing I could do back then.”

Bhaghabhonerano returned to school and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in environmental forestry. At university, he learned that his experience as a boy was common in refugee settlements across Uganda. Determined to change that reality, he founded Live in Green, which aims to restore forests and improve health by planting trees and selling energy-efficient cookstoves that run on eco-friendly briquettes rather than wood or charcoal.

The cookstoves reduce household fuel consumption by up to 60% and virtually eliminate toxic indoor smoke. They also eliminate the need to chop down trees. Instead, Live in Green employs teams of refugees to collect organic waste like banana peels, maize cobs, and agricultural clippings and transform them into briquettes and compost manure. Today, Live in Green has a staff of 25, produces 20 tonnes of briquettes per month, has sold more than 6,000 of its Eco-Green Cook Stoves, distributed nearly 2 million seedlings, and restored 26 hectares of forest around Kyaka II.

“Growing up in a refugee settlement, I learned that durable solutions were not given priority. It forged this conviction that if we want to solve the problems, we have to do something ourselves.”
Solomon Bhaghabhonerano, Live in Green Founder

Enterprise over aid

There are more refugees today than at any time in human history. Protracted conflicts across the globe, combined with the worsening effects of climate change, have forcibly displaced more than 120 million people around the globe. According to some estimates, by 2050 more than a billion people will be forced to leave their homes. That will represent roughly 10 percent of the world population.

As the crisis worsens, humanitarian aid alone has proven insufficient to meet the scale of need. That was already the case before the U.S. started slashing foreign aid commitments. As countries like Germany, Sweden, and the UK followed suit, humanitarian relief fell between 35 and 40% in 2025 alone. What funding remains tends to be directed at short-term, emergency problems. And yet data suggests that once people are forcibly displaced, their average length of displacement is 20 years.

That’s not an emergency, it’s a lifetime. And it demands solutions that can last as long.

A new wave of displaced entrepreneurs is rising to meet the challenge. Their enterprises cut across a wide range of sectors and span from micro-enterprises like tailor shops and bakeries to established businesses with hundreds of employees. One thing they share in common: These entrepreneurs are building in their own communities, selling products and services that solve local problems.

Maureine Mtebwamagi, pictured with her children, used WiFi access from Kakuma Ventures to teach herself knitting via YouTube — and has since turned that skill into a small business selling to her neighbors. Photo credit: Kelvin Juma / kelvinjumaphoto.com

Take the energy and digital divide. When Acumen Fellow Innocent Tshilombo arrived at the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya as a 20-year-old fleeing war in the DRC, he discovered that the camp was cut off from electricity and Internet. So he founded Kakuma Ventures, which sells solar home systems and WiFi equipment on credit to refugees from Sudan, Somalia, DRC, and elsewhere. Those refugees can then start their own micro-enterprises by selling Internet subscriptions to their neighbors. Kakuma Ventures holds the subscription revenue until the cost of the equipment is paid off, at which point the subscription income becomes profit for the micro-entrepreneur.

Today, Kakuma has 18 employees and 32 micro-entrepreneur partners while providing Internet access to more than 11,000 people.

“This is what we want to show to the world, that the refugee settings are also a market that should be addressed.”
Innocent Tshilombo, Acumen Fellow and Kakuma Ventures Founder

Market access is another stubborn barrier. In Rwanda, where rain cycles have become more unpredictable and devastating floods now give way to debilitating droughts, smallholder farmers and those displaced by natural disaster often have no reliable way to sell what they grow. Acumen grantee Afri-Farmers Market helps solve this problem by connecting farmers directly to customers through its e-commerce platform. It also provides training and inputs to improve yields. With more income, smallholder farmers can implement irrigation systems or greenhouses or even buy crop insurance, which Afri-Farmers Market sells.

“This is about alleviating poverty and ensuring food security. It’s also about improving climate resilience.”
Norman Mugisha, Afri-Farmers Market Founder

Then there is education and employment, perhaps the deepest and most durable challenge. In Uganda and South Sudan, the Africa Youth Action Network “brings young people together so that they can be the change they want to see in the world,” says Simon Marot Touloung, an Acumen Fellow and AYAN’s co-founder and executive director.

Acumen Fellow and AYAN executive director Simon Marot Touloung fosters the next generation of refugee entrepreneurs.

Touloung fled South Sudan when he was just eight years old and at risk of becoming a child soldier. He walked for three weeks with little food or water until he arrived at the Keri transit center, where he was transported in a UNHCR truck to Imvepi Refugee settlement in Uganda. There, he continued to walk 14 kilometers a day just so that he could attend primary school.

“Where I come from, we are looked at as people who are causing the problem,” he says. “As people who go and cheat, who go and fight. But we look at refugees as people who can actually transform their own communities if they’re given the right platform and the right tools.”

Through its Refugee Pathpreneur Project, African Youth Action Network identifies promising young refugee entrepreneurs, with a particular emphasis on women who are already running small businesses and ready to scale. It provides them with seed funding and mentorship to take their ventures to the next level. Since 2015, AYAN has supported 175 refugee-led businesses and impacted more than 5,000 youth.

Likewise, Umoja for Peace and Resilience works in refugee camps in Uganda and the DRC to help residents access decent work and build sustainable livelihoods. It starts by offering vocational training in everything from carpentry and bricklaying to welding and hairdressing. It also offers classes in social innovation and a formal entrepreneurship program complete with starting capital and mentorship.

“We need to address refugee problems from an opportunity perspective. If you bring this perspective that we can work and support ourselves and even change our communities, it has a profound impact.”
Isaac Ashige, Acumen Fellow and Umoja for Peace and Resilience Founder

A recent cohort of 16- and 17-year-old young women in Umoja’s U-Innovate program identified the problem of pollution in their settlement and, with the help of recycling experts and $25,000 in raised funds, launched a start-up called Brilliant Plastic. The environmental enterprise turns plastic bottles into furniture and plastic bags into school bags for children and faux leather purses for adults. Brilliant Plastic now sells their products in both the camp and surrounding host community – an important step toward reaching larger markets and making the business more sustainable.

Acumen Fellow and Umoja for Peace and Resilience Founder Isaac Ashige

“These young ladies are expanding,” says Ashige. “They have hired people to collect plastic waste. Others are working in design or sales. It’s a reminder why we have to do what we are doing.”

The importance of Patient Capital and partnership

Brilliant Plastic’s work in the host community points to a broader truth about refugee entrepreneurship. Camp-based markets, constrained by limited employment and low purchasing power, can only take a business so far. Reaching host communities and wider markets is often what separates a promising idea from a financially viable enterprise.

Getting there requires capital and partnership, and finding the right kind of both has proven to be one of the most persistent challenges refugee entrepreneurs face. Impact funds, microloan lenders, and development finance institutions are stepping up to support refugee-led enterprises. The Refugee Investment Network tracks over 20 refugee-focused investment vehicles in their recent report and is capturing growing investments in their new tool.

Acumen is proud to be part of the movement. In 2022, we launched our FDP Lens Investing Initiative, which committed to investing $4.9 million in refugee-focused businesses in East Africa. Four years later, that capital has now reached more than a dozen companies with capital, technical assistance, or capacity building. Our recent report, From the Margins to the Market, tracks that investment and shares deeper insights from our experience.

Despite this growing activity, the reality on the ground remains bleak for many refugee entrepreneurs, especially when it comes to finding patient capital and partners who give them the time they need to refine a business model, build a team, and deliver a return.

“What do we want from a partner? The number one thing is their flexibility and their understanding.”
Isaac Ashige, Acumen Fellow and Umoja for Peace and Resilience Founder

Ashige points out that external partners have long sought to bring their solutions and impose them on refugee communities. “For so long they are not working, but still they keep on forcing,” he says. “So we want a partner who is going to provide capital that is flexible, either to support the work that we are already doing or some of the concepts that we want to develop.”

Norman Mugisha of Afri-Farmers Market says that finding flexible capital is challenging even for an established business like his. One investor demanded that, as a pre-condition of its $500,000 investment, Afri-Farmers Market couldn’t change its business model, even though expanding into marginalized communities inevitably requires adaptability and experimentation.

“VCs want to see something that’s purely tech-enabled,” he says. “But we’re talking about people who often don’t have smartphones or electricity. It has to be a gradual process.”

“We need you to trust us and work with us so that we can actually change the communities we’re living in,” echoes Touloung of Africa Youth Action Network. Forging partnerships with local organizations is vital for the overall effectiveness of refugee-lens investing, he says, noting that when AYAN announces that it has capital available for entrepreneurs, suddenly everyone is starting a business.

“You need one or two years to know whether an entrepreneur is really doing it for the future sustainability of the organization or just doing it for the funds,” he says. “That’s why we need a partner to give us that long-term commitment and that flexible funding.”

Solomon Bhaghabhonerano turned childhood hardship into a business that brings clean cooking and reforestation to his community. With funding, he’s ready to scale.

Back at the Kyaka II refugee settlement in Uganda, Solomon Bhaghabhonerano is proud of how far Live in Green has come and how much good it has done. Despite this success, he recognizes that its production capacity is insufficient to meet the energy needs of Kyaka II, let alone every refugee community across Uganda.

His team currently fabricates every stove itself, welding it together on-site. Their design outperforms eco-stoves from China, but they aren’t as beautiful to look at. They also lack technology to track how much carbon emissions they save, which would allow Live in Green to apply for carbon credits and scale more quickly.

“If we are supported, imagine how much we could do,” says Bhaghabhonerano.

Acumen invests in ScrapUncle to bring transparency and dignity to India’s recycling economy

Acumen — Thu, 07 May 2026 16:06:03 +0000

Acumen has invested in ScrapUncle (Swapeco Solutions Private Limited), an India-based waste management company that enables households and businesses to responsibly dispose of recyclable materials including e-waste through on-demand collection, while building a more transparent and inclusive recycling value chain.

India generates an estimated 3.8 million metric tons of e-waste annually, much of which flows through an informal system characterized by limited traceability, unsafe working conditions, and inconsistent income for workers. Young migrant workers—many from low-income rural households—often rely on informal scrap collection or other hazardous labor, facing income volatility, stigma, and exposure to unsafe environments.

ScrapUncle addresses these challenges by formalizing scrap collection at the household level. Its platform enables customers to schedule on-demand pickups with transparent pricing and weight verification, while ensuring that materials are properly segregated and routed to verified recyclers. For collection partners and warehouse workers, the company provides consistent income, safer working conditions, and opportunities for upskilling—transforming an informal sector into a pathway for dignified employment.

Since its founding, ScrapUncle has served nearly 100,000 households, with many returning to the platform for repeat pickups. As the company reduces intermediaries and improves traceability, recyclers gain more consistent access to higher-quality materials—making the entire value chain more efficient.

“Our ambition has always been to build the next e-commerce opportunity for recyclables, reimagining the model as C2B instead of B2C. With Acumen’s support, we’re working to organize the recycling supply chain at scale and make responsible disposal simple and accessible for households across India.”
Mukul Chhabra, Founder of ScrapUncle

Acumen’s investment will support ScrapUncle’s expansion into new cities, strengthen its technology platform, and enable the development of downstream processing capabilities for e-waste.

“ScrapUncle is organizing a part of the recycling system that has historically been fragmented and overlooked,” said Paraag Sabhlok, Investment Director at Acumen India. “That shift not only improves traceability for recyclers, it creates more stable and dignified livelihoods for workers at the front lines of the value chain.”

In addition to a multi-city expansion, ScrapUncle aims to deepen its presence in the e-waste value chain and create dignified livelihoods for more than 1,000 collectors in the next phase. As the company grows, it is positioned to demonstrate how technology and operational rigor can transform one of India’s most fragmented industries into a more equitable and sustainable system.

Acumen invests in Pullus to expand fair poultry markets for smallholder farmers in Nigeria

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 18:52:19 +0000

Acumen has invested in Pullus Africa Solutions Limited, a Nigerian agribusiness working to create fairer and more reliable markets for smallholder poultry farmers. The investment will support Pullus in expanding its aggregation and cold-chain infrastructure, enabling farmers to sell chickens year-round at stable prices.

Across Nigeria, many smallholder farmers depend on informal middlemen who offer extremely low prices for chickens and frequently delay payments. Without reliable buyers, farmers often restrict production to festive seasons such as Ramadan and Christmas to avoid selling under pressure. The result is unstable incomes for farmers and periodic shortages in poultry supply.

Pullus is building a different model. The company aggregates chickens from smallholder farmers and supplies retailers, restaurants, hotels, and food chain stores across Nigeria. By purchasing birds directly and negotiating fair prices with buyers, Pullus helps farmers access dependable markets while reducing their reliance on exploitative intermediaries.

The company also provides training, extension services, and input financing to improve poultry management and flock health. Through these services, farmers gain access to practical knowledge and resources that help increase productivity and reduce losses. Among farmers receiving extension support, more than nine in ten report lower flock mortality rates.

“Acumen’s investment accelerates our mission to make poultry farming more profitable and resilient for smallholder farmers. Together, we are building a scalable, market-driven solution that strengthens food security and livelihoods across Nigeria and Africa.”
Opeoluwa Fayomi, CEO and Co-Founder of Pullus

Building a stronger poultry value chain

Opeoluwa and her co-founder bring more than a decade of experience in the poultry sector. Opeoluwa began by building a poultry farm, growing it from a small operation of 500 birds into an agribusiness producing tens of thousands annually. Together, these co-founders have witnessed how limited market access, weak distribution networks, and lack of technical support held many smallholder farmers back.

Pullus was founded to address these challenges across the poultry value chain. Today, the company connects farmers to reliable buyers while providing the services needed to improve productivity and incomes.

Pullus has registered more than 6,000 smallholder farmers on its platform and trained over 28,000 farmers in poultry management and business practices. The company sold approximately 246,000 birds in 2025 and aims to sell more than 2 million birds by 2029.

Pullus is also notable for its leadership. Opeoluwa is a female founder with deep sector expertise, and women make up half of the company’s senior management team, reflecting a commitment to building inclusive leadership within Nigeria’s growing agricultural sector.

Why we invested

At Acumen, we believe strengthening agricultural value chains is essential for improving farmer livelihoods and building resilient food systems. Pullus addresses a critical gap for smallholder poultry farmers: access to fair and reliable markets.

Acumen’s investment will help Pullus acquire solar-powered cold rooms and refrigerated trucks, allowing the company to store poultry across seasons and expand distribution across states. This infrastructure will reduce losses, stabilize supply, and allow Pullus to reach more farmers and buyers.

The investment will also provide working capital to purchase chickens from farmers and support the expansion of the company’s farmer financing and extension programs.

“Acumen’s investment is a catalytic step in advancing Pullus’ mission to make poultry farming more profitable and resilient for smallholder farmers in Nigeria. When we first met Opeoluwa, Pullus was still pre-revenue, but her clarity of vision and conviction stood out. The speed and discipline with which the company has scaled reinforces our belief that this is a durable, market-driven platform with the potential to strengthen food security while improving farmer livelihoods.”
Feyisola Adekogbe, Investment Manager at Acumen West Africa

With Acumen’s support, the company will deploy new cold-chain hubs in Nasarawa, enabling Pullus to better service Abuja and other surrounding states, while contributing to a more equitable poultry market for Nigeria’s smallholder farmers.

This work is supported by the CFYE (Challenge Fund for Youth Employment).

Acumen invests in Instollar to power solar jobs and energy access in Nigeria

Acumen — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:16:31 +0000

Acumen has invested in Instollar, a Nigerian digital marketplace that connects solar companies with a growing pool of trained, on-demand gig workers for flexible deployment on projects. By reducing the cost and complexity of accessing trained workers, Instollar helps clean energy companies scale faster while unlocking income opportunities for youth, women, and underserved communities.

The investment marks a milestone in Acumen’s broader model for supporting early-stage entrepreneurs. Instollar’s founder and CEO, Chinwe Udo-Davis, was selected as a 2024 West Africa Acumen Fellow. A year later, she became an Acumen Angels awardee, a program that provides catalytic funding to promising social entrepreneurs. Now, Acumen is investing in her company as it begins to scale, illustrating how early support can help mission-driven founders build ventures that attract long-term capital.

“This investment from Acumen affirms our belief that access to clean energy depends not just on technology, but on people. With Acumen’s support, we can expand economic opportunity while accelerating the clean energy transition across Africa.”
Chinwe Udo-Davis, CEO of Instollar

Nigeria faces a dual challenge: widespread youth unemployment and persistent energy poverty. More than half of the country’s young people are unemployed or underemployed, while more than 100 million Nigerians lack reliable electricity. At the same time, the solar sector is expanding rapidly as households and businesses turn to distributed energy solutions. Yet many solar companies struggle to scale because they cannot easily find trained technicians to deploy projects across the country.

Instollar addresses this bottleneck by building a technology-enabled workforce marketplace for the solar industry. Think of it like Uber for clean energy services. Through its digital platform, solar companies can quickly find and deploy vetted technicians for installation, maintenance, and training services based on location, skill, and availability. The platform also enables real-time project tracking and automated payment workflows, bringing transparency and efficiency to a sector where informal labor networks often slow deployment.

Since launching in 2023, Instollar has built a network of more than 1,400 solar technicians across all 36 Nigerian states and facilitated over 2,000 installations for clients including ENGIE, BBOXX, NXT Grid, and Acumen investee Koolboks. By linking skilled workers with growing demand for solar installations, the company helps young Nigerians access reliable income opportunities while enabling energy providers to scale their operations.

“Instollar exemplifies Acumen’s belief that innovative, technology-enabled models can drive meaningful social impact while building commercially viable businesses. By creating a structured pathway for Nigeria’s skilled youth to access dignified employment in the growing solar sector, Instollar addresses both the country’s unemployment challenge and its need for clean energy deployment.”
Babatunde Usman, Acumen West Africa Investment Manager

Acumen’s investment, made through the Challenge Fund for Youth Employment (CFYE), will help Instollar grow its technician network, expand its client base, and strengthen its platform technology. The company also plans to establish a physical training center to improve technician certification and expand training opportunities. The company’s InstallHER initiative seeks to train 10,000 African women as certified solar technicians by 2030.

Acumen invests in Mountain Harvest to support specialty coffee and farmer incomes in Uganda

Acumen — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 20:28:11 +0000

Acumen has invested in Mountain Harvest, a Ugandan specialty coffee company working with smallholder farmers to improve incomes and promote climate resilience through regenerative agriculture. The investment reinforces Acumen’s dedication to building inclusive agricultural markets that enable farmers to earn a living income while protecting the ecosystems they depend on.

Uganda is the world’s eighth-largest coffee producer, yet most of its 1.8 million smallholder coffee farmers continue to face significant challenges. Low productivity, volatile prices, limited access to premium markets, and growing climate pressures have left many farmers earning well below a living income. In Uganda’s mountainous regions, such as Mount Elgon, Rwenzori, and Kigezi, these challenges are compounded by remoteness and historically limited commercial coffee production, despite favorable growing conditions.

Mountain Harvest addresses these constraints by working directly with more than 1,000 smallholder farmers to source organic Arabica coffee, process it to specialty standards, and connect it to premium international buyers. As a farmer-allied intermediary, the company pays farmers 13% to 37% above market rates while supporting them with bundled services like agronomic training, access to inputs, and microfinance. This integrated approach helps farmers improve yields, manage climate risk, and capture more value from global coffee markets.

The company’s model is underpinned by a focus on traceability, gender inclusion, and youth engagement. Mountain Harvest has implemented digital traceability systems that link coffee back to individual farmers, enabling transparency for buyers and premium pricing for producers. Its gender action plan and targeted microfinance offerings support women’s participation and leadership, while youth employment initiatives create new pathways into an aging sector. Together, these elements position Mountain Harvest as a differentiated player in Uganda’s specialty coffee landscape.

“Acumen’s investment in Mountain Harvest reflects a deep alignment around mission and values. We share a belief that what tastes best in your cup can and should provide a living income for farmers — and that patient capital, paired with strong local leadership, can build inclusive and resilient markets that work for everyone.”
Kenneth Barigye, Managing Director, Mountain Harvest

Acumen’s investment will support the company’s next phase of growth, including the construction of a temperature-controlled warehouse, accompanied with a dry mill and color sorter, and land acquisition to expand processing capacity. These investments are expected to improve quality control, optimize product mix, and strengthen margins — key steps toward financial sustainability and long-term scale.

The investment also represents a strategic shift toward patient capital, strengthening Mountain Harvest’s balance sheet and enhancing its ability to attract additional financing. By enabling the company to leverage its assets and expand its farmer network, Acumen aims to demonstrate that specialty coffee can be a powerful engine for inclusive growth in Uganda.

“Acumen’s investment in Mountain Harvest is catalytic. It enables the company to deepen its impact with farmers, strengthen its financial sustainability, and set new standards for gender and youth inclusion in Uganda’s coffee sector.”

Millycent Aoko, Investment Manager, Acumen East Africa

Looking ahead, Mountain Harvest plans to expand its farmer base to 2,600 by 2028, with a strong focus on women and young farmers. It also aims to complete its new processing facilities and reach sustainable EBITDA profitability by 2029. With growing demand for traceable, high-quality coffee and increasing urgency around climate resilience, Mountain Harvest is positioned to show how premium agricultural value chains can support a thriving ecosystem of smallholder farmers.

This work is supported by the CFYE (Challenge Fund for Youth Employment) and the Autodesk Foundation as part of Acumen’s Trellis initiative.

Acumen invests in Omia to unlock agricultural markets for displaced farmers in Northern Uganda

Acumen — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 15:01:14 +0000

Acumen has invested in Omia Agribusiness Development Group Ltd., an agribusiness operating across Northern Uganda that provides smallholder farmers with access to quality farm inputs, practical training, and reliable market channels. Omia works extensively with refugee and displaced communities, helping farmers improve productivity, increase incomes, and build resilience in one of the region’s most underserved agricultural markets.

Northern Uganda is home to nearly one million refugees and displaced people, many of whom rely on farming on very small plots of land. These farmers often earn 30–50% less than host communities due to limited access to inputs, lack of training tailored to constrained conditions, and unreliable or exploitative market access. Few agricultural companies have built models that address these realities, leaving many farmers locked out of viable economic participation.

Omia addresses these barriers through an integrated model that combines affordable agricultural inputs, practical training suited to small landholdings, and a buy-back channel that enables farmers to reliably sell their produce. Omia aligns input provision with market access, reducing risk for farmers and creating the confidence needed to invest in higher-quality inputs and improved practices.

Today, Omia serves more than 100,000 smallholder farmers across Northern Uganda, including thousands of forcibly displaced farmers in refugee-hosting districts. The majority of these farmers live below the $2.15 per day poverty line, yet the company’s model is already driving measurable gains: 92% of farmers report higher yields, 89% report increased earnings, and 91% report improved quality of life, demonstrating how access to the right inputs, training, and markets can unlock productivity even in highly constrained environments.

The company’s approach is rooted in building trust in hard-to-reach communities. By offering fair pricing and reliable offtake—often at the expense of higher short-term margins—Omia has developed strong customer loyalty and repeat purchasing behavior, creating a durable and scalable business model in a historically underserved market.

“We are not in the business of reinforcing donor dependence. We are showing farmers that they have the ability to build something greater through enterprise, even in the most challenging environments.”
Iganachi Razaki Omia, founder of Omia

Acumen’s investment, structured as an impact-linked convertible note, will support working capital for high-margin opportunities and enable the company to expand into new districts, deepen engagement with farmer groups, and strengthen its operational and financial systems.

“Omia represents a powerful example of how inclusive business models can unlock both commercial value and meaningful impact,” said Brian Ondeng, Investment Manager at Acumen East Africa. “They are skilled at serving displaced and underserved farmers with dignity and practical solutions, proving that even the hardest-to-reach markets can become engines of growth and resilience.”

This is Acumen’s third investment under its Forcibly Displaced People (FDP) Lens Investing program in East Africa. The program aims to mobilize capital into social enterprises inclusive of FDP and their host populations to increase economic opportunities for displacement-affected communities. It is supported by the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation.

Acumen Angels and the power of catalytic capital

Acumen — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:50:18 +0000

For Ahmed Oyedotun, growth brought new questions.

Afrimash, the Nigerian agri-input platform he co-founded, was gaining traction. Farmers were turning to the platform to access quality seeds, fertilizers, and livestock inputs without relying on unreliable middlemen. Demand increased, and the opportunity to reach more farmers became clear.

But as the company expanded, Ahmed and his team began asking deeper questions about how best to scale while maintaining trust with the farmers they served.

“At the time, we had uncertainty around our go-to-market strategy. Our most selling category, day-old chicks, was facing increasing challenges as customers demanded more quality service, lower mortality, and quality delivery.”

Ahmed Oyedotun, co-founder and chief executive officer of Afrimash

The team realized that, to keep customer confidence intact as the platform grew, they would need to provide more transparent order and product tracing. To do that, they would need to strengthen their technology infrastructure and improve delivery points for day-old chicks. That in turn would require what so many promising start-ups in underfunded markets struggle to find: catalytic capital.

So Ahmed, a 2023 West Africa Acumen Fellow, applied for Acumen Angels — an early-stage capital award designed to advance our community of impact-driven entrepreneurs. The Acumen Angels award supports business models and leaders with a high potential to solve problems of poverty and build a world based on dignity.

This week we announced 30 new Angels awardees. These social innovators, like Ahmed, often navigate moments of real promise and uncertainty, when the need for their solution is clear but the path to sustainable growth and scale is still taking shape. At that stage, the right capital can be game-changing.

For Afrimash, the results were immediate and practical. With capital from Acumen Angels in 2023, Afrimash improved the quality of its day-old chick deliveries through 16 newly established pickup centers. It also expanded transparent order traceability through Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), making it easier for customers to access services without needing to visit the company’s website. For farmers in areas with limited or no internet access, that mattered. Within six months, sales had doubled. So did the improvement in service, as mortality at delivery points dropped from about 0.7% of orders to less than 0.1%.

Better decisions need breathing room

For early-stage entrepreneurs solving complex problems, catalytic capital does more than fund implementation. It can create the room to pause, test assumptions, focus on the problem more clearly, and ask sharper questions about what the business really needs in order to grow. That kind of space is rare and often transformative.

In Afrimash’s case, that space helped Ahmed and his team look more closely at how customers were actually interacting with the business. With support from a pro-bono consulting engagement with Bain & Company, a long-term partner of Acumen, Afrimash uncovered a new channel in addition to USSD. They realized that many farmers engaged through WhatsApp, a channel they already used every day. That insight helped shape the company’s next step, including the development of Afrimash’s AI-powered agricultural virtual assistant, AVA, which allows customers to order through WhatsApp, track deliveries, and receive agricultural advice.

Today, WhatsApp and USSD power about 30% of Afrimash’s monthly sales.

“From the farmer support solutions we built to the improvement in service delivery to a clear roadmap, it is clear that we can serve customers better and gain the trust of our customers.”

Ahmed Oyedotun, co-founder and chief executive officer of Afrimash

Since receiving the Acumen Angels award, Afrimash has continued to strengthen its operations and now serves more than 8,000 customers and directly impacts 45,000 lives. Its growth reflects what becomes possible when impact-driven entrepreneurs have the resources not only to move faster, but to think more clearly about how they grow. That is the role Acumen Angels is designed to play.

Today, a new group of founders steps into that same moment. Since launching in 2018, Acumen Angels has awarded $5.9 million to 128 early-stage organizations globally. Together, these leaders have reached more than 27 million lives, created over 106,000 jobs, served more than 883,000 paying customers, and raised more than $54 million in follow-on capital.

The 2025 Acumen Angels awardees represent the next generation of leaders working to bring bold solutions to historically excluded communities. From climate innovations across Africa to new models of community leadership, and financial inclusion around the world, these founders are tackling urgent challenges while building systems that enable long-term change.

Click here to see the full list of our 2025 Acumen Angels awardees.

From wealth to agency: How women can fund a more just future

Acumen — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 18:38:43 +0000

Acumen Partner Michelle Yue has built a career across many fields; as an entrepreneur, impact investor, educator, community builder, women’s advocate, and strategic philanthropist. No matter the room or role she’s in, she’s driven by a clear conviction: When women and girls have agency and ownership, they change the world.

As we mark International Women’s Day, we connected with Michelle about her personal journey that has led to and sustained her work — from co-founding the Beam Network, an education platform and global community for women of significant wealth, to serving as Chair of the Millby Foundation, where she partners with Acumen to empower a new generation of leaders across Southeast Asia to build a more just and inclusive future.

We also explored the importance of audacity and risk-taking, long-term thinking, and why the next generation of women philanthropists gives her extraordinary hope.

You are deeply committed to helping women and girls have the opportunity and agency to shape their own lives. How did that become a focus for you?

I grew up in a family where helping others wasn’t framed as philanthropy. It was simply part of who we were. With a mother who was a social worker and a father who was a doctor, service feels like it’s part of my DNA. I firmly believe that privilege comes with responsibility, and that principle has guided many of my choices.

That belief became deeply personal during my first visit to Thailand in my mid-20s. Seeing the depth of poverty – and how it constrained the ability of girls to shape their own futures – affected me profoundly. That experience crystallised my determination to use my resources, skills, and networks to help expand agency and opportunity for women and girls.

As someone with a platform, what conversations are you most eager to influence? And how do you think visibility and storytelling can change how we give?

Right now, I’m focused on influencing conversations about who gets to make decisions and on what terms. Supporting women and girls isn’t only about funding programs; it’s about ensuring they have real authority over resources, priorities, and solutions that shape their lives. Too often, well-intentioned philanthropy still centralizes power with funders rather than those with lived experience.

Visibility and storytelling matter because they challenge that imbalance. When women and girls are viewed not just as recipients of support but as decision-makers, leaders, and problem-solvers, it forces a different kind of accountability. It shifts how funders assess risk, success, and impact, and it invites more trust-based, long-term approaches rather than short-term or transactional ones.

At its best, storytelling doesn’t just inspire empathy; it reshapes how capital flows. It influences who is trusted, whose expertise is valued, and how resources are deployed. That shift – toward agency, ownership, and long-term thinking – is a thread that runs through all of my work, and it’s essential to creating sustainable, systemic change.

You founded the Beam Network to empower women wealthholders to shape the future of finance and change the world. Why did you feel that community was missing?

When I started looking for financial education and a genuine peer network for myself, I was struck by how little existed for women. Most resources were either aimed at those going into the finance industry, tied to a financial institution, or focused on basic budgeting. Women with responsibility for significant capital find little tailored support.

What I’ve learned is simple but powerful: Women learn differently when they’re in a trusted community. They ask the questions they’ve hesitated to voice, openly share their challenges, and support one another’s growth. And the shift that happens – in confidence, clarity, and agency – is truly extraordinary.

The Beam Network was created to be the go-to private financial education platform and peer community for women of significant wealth. It mirrors what I admire in Acumen: the belief that when people are equipped with the right tools, frameworks and peer support, they make more intentional, values-led decisions that can influence systems, not just individual outcomes.

What does being entrepreneurial in philanthropy mean to you? How do you balance risk-taking with the need for measurable, scalable impact?

Philanthropic capital, especially private philanthropic capital, should be the most risk-tolerant capital in the system. Because it is, by definition, “surplus to immediate needs,” it can back bold ideas, emerging leaders, and unproven solutions that hold enormous potential.

But risk-taking doesn’t mean being careless. Like any investment, it’s important to do your due diligence. Having a robust strategy and theory of change is key. Then combine that with rigorous, data-driven metrics to track progress, assess success, and ensure accountability. For me, the end goal is not just to treat symptoms but to tackle root causes and change the very systems that perpetuate large-scale problems.

I care deeply about transparency with grantee partners. Systems change is inherently bumpy. Assumptions break and context shifts. Our role as funders is to support learning with honest dialogue about what’s working and what isn’t. I’m conscious of the power dynamics at play, which is why I see myself as a partner, rather than simply a funder, and actively encourage open conversation. I want to hear both the successes and the setbacks because real progress depends on learning from both.

That’s what entrepreneurial philanthropy looks like to me: courage paired with curiosity, partnership, and learning.

What about Acumen’s model or mission resonates with you? And where do you think Acumen has the greatest potential to impact some of the world’s biggest challenges?

Acumen’s commitment to moral leadership stands out. The intentional way it develops leaders who can navigate complexity and make values-driven decisions is rare, and the leadership they foster is increasingly essential.

What also strikes a chord is Acumen’s understanding that no single form of capital can address the scale of challenges we face. As issues like climate migration, inequality, and entrenched poverty become more complex, lasting impact requires a blended capital approach, combining philanthropic capital, patient investment, and market-based tools. Acumen’s leadership in this space has immense potential to shape how the next chapter of impact is funded and led.

Looking ahead, what gives you hope about the next generation of philanthropists — especially women — and the kind of world they’re building together?

The next generation is extraordinary. They are values-aligned in a way my generation simply wasn’t — in where they work, what they buy, and how they give. I’ve been deeply inspired by the younger people I meet: their clarity, their creativity, and the breadth of issues they champion. They’re thoughtful, globally conscious, and unafraid to ask hard questions about power, justice, and systems. But what excites me most is when younger people, particularly women, step into their power with intention. It’s electrifying when they recognize and deploy their capital — philanthropic, investment, and social — to work in unison, becoming far more effective at advancing the futures they care about.

When you take a break from changing the world, we’d love to know what you’re enjoying reading or watching or a place that you’ve recently visited that has inspired you?

I’ve recently discovered Lisa See’s writing and just finished “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan.” Engaging, beautifully crafted, and quietly powerful, it tells the story of the lifelong friendship between two women while they navigate the harrowing expectations placed on women in 19th century China.

Travel-wise, visiting The Feuerle Collection in Berlin was a standout. Designed by English architect John Pawson and housed in a former telecommunications bunker, it’s not only a highly personal art collection but an immersive, almost monastic sensory experience. And I managed to tick something off my bucket list last year: seeing the autumn colours in Vermont. It was every bit as magical as I’d hoped.

Who pays for dignity? Rethinking India’s waste economy

Acumen — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 15:20:58 +0000

Despite the essential role that waste workers perform in any functioning city, they are often severely underpaid and denied the dignity, security, and recognition they deserve. This is especially true in India, where an estimated 4 million people work as Safai Saathis, or ragpickers, combing through hazardous landfills while facing extreme poverty and social alienation.

A new wave of startups is working to transform India’s waste management sector and the workers who power it. They’re doing so with a mix of innovative technology, community engagement, education, and business models that center worker dignity and safety. By providing Safai Saathis with fair pay, protections, and a path to stability, they’re helping people rise out of poverty while building the foundations of a truly circular economy. Acumen is proud to have invested in three of these companies — Green Worms, Bintix, and ReCircle — through our Green Growth Initiative.

Even as these enterprises gain traction, they remain fragile and are struggling to transform the larger system while surviving on razor-thin margins. That tension was at the center of a recent workshop that Acumen hosted with the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE). Together, we gathered entrepreneurs, investors, waste picker associations, and leaders across India’s waste sector to confront a crucial question:

What will it take to create and scale dignified jobs in waste value chains in India?

Entrepreneurs can’t absorb the cost alone

Participants reflected on recent progress across the sector and the structural constraints that continue to make dignity difficult to sustain at scale. One major theme emerged: Entrepreneurs are often left on their own to absorb the cost of paying workers fairly.

“It’s on us [entrepreneurs] to ensure that value transparently passes down to waste workers. But at the end of the day, it comes down to whether our unit economics work.”
Roshan Miranda, founder of Bintix

Competing in thin-margin markets, enterprises cannot absorb the full cost of dignity by themselves. And too often, they are not supported — or pushed — to do so. Jabir Karat, founder of Green Worms, highlighted the lack of prioritization from corporate brands and some investors. “It’s not the lack of intent,” he said. “Most recognize the importance of treating waste workers with dignity. But no one is actually prioritizing these things.”

He described inconsistent audits around how well his employees are treated or the safety and cleanliness of his facilities. Another entrepreneur raised a challenge to investors, “Are you just looking at profit? Or are you really pushing enterprises to fulfill this, even if it means sacrificing one to two percent margin?”

Is there wealth in waste – and for whom?

This led to a deeper reckoning with a widely held assumption: that waste is a profitable resource.

“We have to bust the myth that there is wealth in waste,” said Nalini Shekar representing the Alliance of Indian Wastepickers. “There’s money for people who put their hands in waste. Not for managers or big companies. Once we accept this, these interventions can work.”

Many echoed that waste will never function as a true profit center. In reality, responsible, end-to-end waste management is fundamentally a cost, not a profit engine — one that waste workers have historically paid for. In Karnataka for instance, there’s a viability gap funding of four to five rupees per kilo to manage these Materials Recovery Facilities.

Shekar Prabhakar of Hasiru Dala pointed to a deeper structural flaw. “It’s only because the waste picker collects and sorts waste that is tradeable, and the further chain of dealers and aggregators sort it into the fine categories that the recycler gets as homogenous input as possible. The value add of that chain of collecting, sorting and baling is what makes waste valuable and is not compensated adequately for that. Before that waste is waste. It has zero value.”

The result is a fundamental contradiction: Those who create the most value capture the least. Yet most investment still flows into recycling and processing rather than into collection and aggregation, where dignity is most at stake.

What it will take to scale dignified jobs

1. Government engagement

As the conversation turned to solutions, participants were candid about the importance of government and the challenges of engaging it. In most of India, households do not pay for the waste collection; instead they get paid for the scrap they sell. This fundamentally distorts incentives across the system and makes political engagement difficult.

“We’re always sitting on the fence about political engagement,” one participant confessed. “But it is critical at this point. Even what we’re saying about people expecting a free waste service is in some ways driven by what our political leaders promised.”

Others pointed to local government as underutilized system stabilizers. “There’s a lot we’re missing by not engaging more deeply with lower rungs of government, like ward officers, sanitary inspectors, and supervisors who see fewer transitions,” said Gauri Mirashi, co-founder of EcoSattva. “They can help build systems that work.”

Participants cited Bangalore and Kerala as examples of where local government engagement has enabled more functional waste systems. Across the board, they emphasized that meaningful change requires collective advocacy, moving beyond fragmented, short-term efforts toward long-term planning.

“Until enforcement changes, none of this will really change,” said Viraj Joshi, investor at RainMatter

2. Aligning corporate procurement and ground realities

In recycled plastics, prices are benchmarked to virgin plastic, ignoring the real costs of collection and pre-processing. Corporates demand high quality but rarely pay for what it takes to deliver it.

“The human angle behind waste is mostly ignored by brands”
Jabir Karat, founder of Green Worms

Creating transparency is essential. For instance, The Circulate Initiative, a global nonprofit, launched the Responsible Sourcing Initiative in 2023, a program focused on addressing human rights issues in recycling supply chains. Companies can use its Harmonized Responsible Sourcing Framework for Recycled Materials to improve their responsible sourcing practices, and implement human rights due diligence. The Responsible Sourcing Initiative currently has seven implementation projects in Asia and Africa, with plans to expand to Latin America in 2026.

The initiative has found traction with support from global brands and foundations but scaling implementation requires time, trust, and proof of a viable model. “Our implementation model is centered on engaging the full value chain to co-create remediation solutions that address root causes of human rights challenges. In time, we hope the learnings from these projects can be used to scale and advance responsible sourcing in more value chains and geographies.” said Arun Murugesh, Responsible Sourcing Initiative Director India at The Circulate Initiative.

3. Waste workers as central partners

Waste workers must be partners, not peripheral beneficiaries. Chinmayi Naik, executive director of Hasiru Dala shared the example of Bangalore’s Decentralized Waste Collection Centre (DWCC), where waste pickers operate the centers, conduct collections, and hold formal MOUs with the government.

“These models only work when there is viability gap funding and support from the government,” said Chinmayi.

As waste systems modernize, it is essential that waste workers are integrated. Whether through the Swachh Bharat Mission, NAMASTE scheme, or Solid Waste Management Rules, inclusion must be built in and backed by local implementation capacity and dedicated financing. Without this, modernization risks displacing livelihoods rather than dignifying them.

Looking Ahead

Despite the scale of the challenge, the leaders in the room remained committed to the future of dignified waste work. They agreed that dignity won’t emerge from innovation alone or policy in isolation.

Instead, it will require coordinated action across the ecosystem — investors, waste enterprises, worker collectives, and policymakers working in tandem. Most urgently, this means a shared commitment to advocacy from investors, corporates, and intermediaries to build collective muscle, align messaging, and engage government consistently with the right counterparts. In turn, governments need partners on the ground to translate policy into action.

It also requires sustained financing, particularly patient capital and viability gap funding, to enable long-term planning rather than short-term pilots. Most of all, it demands a willingness to continually confront who really bears the cost of dignity.

If you’re a waste leader interested in a potential future convening, please email nnadkarni@acumen.org.

To learn more, read Acumen’s recent report, What Waste Workers Want, which gathers insights from over 350 Safai Saathis in India.

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From wealth to agency: How women can fund a more just future

You are deeply committed to helping women and girls have the opportunity and agency to shape their own lives. How did that become a focus for you?

As someone with a platform, what conversations are you most eager to influence? And how do you think visibility and storytelling can change how we give?

You founded the Beam Network to empower women wealthholders to shape the future of finance and change the world. Why did you feel that community was missing?

What does being entrepreneurial in philanthropy mean to you? How do you balance risk-taking with the need for measurable, scalable impact?

What about Acumen’s model or mission resonates with you? And where do you think Acumen has the greatest potential to impact some of the world’s biggest challenges?

Looking ahead, what gives you hope about the next generation of philanthropists — especially women — and the kind of world they’re building together?

When you take a break from changing the world, we’d love to know what you’re enjoying reading or watching or a place that you’ve recently visited that has inspired you?

Share

More from our Knowledge Hub

Who pays for dignity? Rethinking India’s waste economy

Entrepreneurs can’t absorb the cost alone

Is there wealth in waste – and for whom?

What it will take to scale dignified jobs

1. Government engagement

2. Aligning corporate procurement and ground realities

3. Waste workers as central partners

Looking Ahead

Share

More from our Knowledge Hub