For 16 years, Partners in Food Solutions has been connecting volunteers from U.S. companies with African businesses to improve food systems on the continent.
A Minnesota-based nonprofit founded by General Mills will tap the expertise of African business leaders to increase its impact and broaden its reach. Mandla Nkomo took over as CEO on Monday with a mission to “create more opportunity.”
“It’s really interesting to see the potential this organization still has,” Nkomo said in a recent interview from South Africa, where he’s based. “We’ve worked with over 2,000 African entrepreneurs and impacted millions of smallholder farmers, but the truth is we’re only scratching the surface of the potential.”
Raised in Zimbabwe, Nkomo has worked in food, agriculture and economic development for private companies and NGOs in Africa, Europe and the United States, most recently as Chief Growth Officer for the CGIAR Agronomy Excellence Initiative.
Partners in Food Solutions (PFS) provides food processing, business and supply chain expertise to entrepreneurs and companies, enabling African communities to add value to their crops and grow local economies.
“With every link in the value chain working, Africa can not only feed itself, but also contribute to feeding the world,” the nonprofit said. Last year, PFS served 700 clients, who on average saw significant growth in revenue, labor, and farm supply chains.
Co-founder and longtime CEO Jeff Dykstra will stay on in an advisory role for the rest of the year, saying PFS’s “best days are yet to come.”
Nkomo agreed.
“I think I joined the organization at the right time to start asking questions about what’s possible and how we can organize ourselves around that,” he said.
The new leader shared further thoughts about the nonprofit in the following interview, which has been edited for clarity and length.
Why did you join PFS?
My academic background is in biochemistry, which really taught me the fundamentals of food and agriculture, which later became the love of my life.
So I’ve always bounced back and forth between working in the food sector and the agriculture sector, not just from an entrepreneurial perspective, but also from a development perspective: How do you help people to be the best version of themselves, especially in places like Africa, where there are so many challenges to overcome, but at the same time, how do you turn obvious opportunities into sustainable, thriving businesses?
So this has really been a journey of satisfying my curiosity about the possibility of creating really great products that have a big impact on people who spend their money, and at the same time, trying to unlock human potential.
When PFS came along, a lot of things aligned.
How are Africa’s demographic changes impacting its needs?
If you look at the African continent, I think we are entering the most exciting phase in African history. Africa will soon be home to the largest youth population in the world. And the second most important thing is that the continent is experiencing rapid urbanization.
Feeding large urban populations is a challenge that Africa has never tackled on a large scale before, but it will need to do so in the near future. But secondly, Africa has a huge amount of talent, what we call a demographic dividend. How do we unlock that potential, especially when so many people in Africa have survived on subsistence agriculture for so long?
We need to build strong links with the countryside where our food is produced, develop the right talent to rise to the occasion, and ultimately get food to the kinds of food consumers the continent hasn’t had to cater to before.
Currently, food imports from Africa are on the rise as opposed to locally produced food, so if conflict breaks out in Ukraine, food prices in Africa will start to rise significantly.
How would you expand the philanthropic side of PFS?
Our secret sauce is our ability to say to global food companies like General Mills, Cargill, “Here’s an opportunity for you to contribute by giving your employees a great opportunity to share their knowledge and skills to help revolutionize food processing on the African continent.”
Our task now is to deepen that impact, expand our base of corporate partners and bring our services and products to more countries on the continent.
So our job is to first recognize this incredible asset that these companies have and then point out that there’s an opportunity here without straying from their core business mission to their shareholders.
What will be the impact on PFS?
Our first client, Komako, basically started with the idea of strengthening conservation in Zambia. Rural people were being asked to protect plants and animals, but there was no real benefit to them. What Komako started doing was creating incentives for people to protect some of the biodiversity in their area by creating value. So they put beehives, for example, in areas where they didn’t want to cut down trees. The beehives would bring in income, so of course they don’t want to destroy the trees.
But they were so successful, they suddenly had loads of honey. So what do they do with it? They need to turn it into a product. So PFS started working with them to help them turn the various products that they were getting from their conservation efforts into a food product that met all the necessary standards and could be put on supermarket shelves.
So we have been instrumental in taking this company from what started as a small development project over the last 15 years to becoming perhaps one of the largest consumer goods companies in Zambia.
Why is PFS’s connection to Minnesota so important?
Perhaps the most important message I want to convey, especially to Minneapolis residents, is that the tradition of giving that Minnesota is known for continues at PFS, and my job as the next CEO will be to create even more opportunities for Minnesotans to contribute with their time, donations or through the organizations they work for.
I recently visited Mill City Museum to say goodbye to the outgoing CEO and got to meet many of these people there, and one person said to me, “I’ve been donating to this organization for many years, and I’d love to see how much more impact we can have with you on board.”
So I already have my marching orders.
