AgDevCo

Expected impact

Our role

AgDevCo has provided a $4m mezzanine loan to Victory Farms, the fastest-growing fish farm in Sub-Saharan Africa. AgDevCo’s investment supports the company’s continued growth and impact, including the construction of a feed mill and expansion into Rwanda.

For decades the wild catch from Africa’s Great Lakes have been declining, with the result that the East African market now relies on imported frozen fish, often of low quality. Victory Farms saw an opportunity to supply affordable protein to consumers in a more sustainable way by growing tilapia, a fish native to northern Africa.

Victory Farms was founded in 2015. Today it operates as a vertically integrated business with a feed mill JV, its own hatcheries, deep water cages in Lake Victoria and Lake Kivu, processing plants and country-wide distribution networks in Kenya and Rwanda. Its main customers are several tens of thousands of market women who buy fish in small batches from a network of sales outlets, who then sell cooked fish in local food markets.

AgDevCo has supported Victory Farms with TA to develop a customised Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system and purchase point-of-sale devices, providing more robust controls around revenues and stock. Further TA support was provided to the business for capacity building and the development and implementation of good practice aligned Environmental and Social Management System (ESMS) in line with AgDevCo’s Responsible Business Principles (RBPs) to work towards alignment with the IFC Performance Standards. 

Our investments in Kenya