AgDevCo

Expected impact

Our role

Our role – AgDevCo has provided a multi-million mezzanine debt investment in Victory Farms, a rapidly growing fish farm in Western Kenya. AgDevCo’s investment will support the company’s continued growth and impact, including the construction of a feed mill and expansion into new countries.

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 its own hatchery, deep water cages in Lake Victoria, a processing plant and country-wide distribution networks. Its main customers are thousands of market women who buy fish in small batches from a network of sales outlets, who before selling the fish cooks them in local food markets.

The company is producing over one million fish per month, employing the best aquaculture practices from around the globe, without the use of antibiotics. Victory Farms takes extensive measures to protect and restore the local ecosystem in which it operates. It aims to become carbon negative by using sustainable feed inputs, installing solar power and planting trees on degraded land.

Our investments in Kenya