Repurposing Business

Richard Lackey has been a paramedic, a disaster relief manager and a hedge fund manager. That's an unusual resume, but it's exactly the combination it takes to do what he's doing now: treating food itself as an investable asset. In 2015, he founded the World Food Bank out of Colorado, built on a simple but radical idea — that you can run an institution like a bank, except the commodity on the balance sheet is grain, not currency. The World Food Bank trains smallholder farmers, finances their inputs, guarantees their offtake and connects them to markets that used to be closed to them. In Kenya, Richard's team went further and bought a media company, turning farm shows into a classroom reaching millions of viewers. By his own count, the work has already moved roughly 1.6 million people out of poverty. The goal is 100 million. Richard will tell you this started as a calling, not a business plan — a conviction, formed while working alongside the U.N. World Food Programme in Africa and the Middle East, that God was asking something specific of him. He's also one of the kind readers of Investing with Africa, and generous enough to be supportive of the project, which makes this conversation personal as well as professional. If you haven't read the book or seen the podcast archive, you can find both at investingwithafrica.com. Connect with Brett Johnson on social media: Facebook Instagram Twitter LinkedIn Visit brettjohnson.biz for articles, devotionals, and more.

Gerhard Visagie trained as a chartered accountant, which means somewhere a balance sheet is grateful. He spent over a decade in South African agrifood private equity before deciding the real opportunity wasn't one sector but a continent, and around 2007 he conceived of and later incorporated Paladin Africa in 2013, launched in 2022, now running money out of Stellenbosch and Kigali, in both private equity and listed African stocks. Paladin calls what it does “Capital with Purpose.” That could be a slogan. Then you look at who they actually fund: a school in Rwanda that forms children academically, spiritually and socially. A ministry that puts bicycles and motorcycles under preachers so they can reach the villages a car can't. A retreat that offers, in their words, quiet spiritual care. This is not a diversity page. This is a man investing his theology, not just his thesis. I've spent this whole series asking what it means to invest with Africa instead of in it. Gerhard may have an answer I haven't heard yet, because his version of “with” runs through the Church as much as it runs through the balance sheet. Connect with Brett Johnson on social media: Facebook Instagram Twitter LinkedIn Visit brettjohnson.biz for articles, devotionals, and more.

Most conversations about investing in Africa focus on the entrepreneur, the deal, or the sector. My guest today is thinking about the layer above all of that — the architecture that allows capital to flow to multiple managers, across multiple ventures, in a way that individual investors simply cannot replicate on their own. Jonathan Wilson is a Canadian fund manager who has spent significant time working in South Africa and across the continent. As Co-Founder and Executive Chair of Third Way Capital, he backs a portfolio of African entrepreneurs — around seven at present — and he is now exploring a fund-of-funds structure that would allow a wider pool of investors to access Africa-focused fund managers they could never reach or evaluate on their own. It is a quiet but important idea. Most Africa-focused funds are too small to attract serious institutional attention individually. Most individual investors with genuine interest in Africa cannot do rigorous due diligence across multiple fund managers simultaneously. A bolting—together—of—funds does not just solve a capital problem. It solves a trust and knowledge problem — and in Africa, those are often the same problem. Connect with Brett Johnson on social media: Facebook Instagram Twitter LinkedIn Visit brettjohnson.biz for articles, devotionals, and more.

In this episode, Brett sits down with Curt Laird to tackle a core question facing investors and entrepreneurs across the continent: Is doing business in Africa actually difficult, or simply different? Curt brings a rare depth of firsthand experience in frontier and emerging markets. Having spent years building and operating businesses in high-stakes, complex environments—navigating ventures in Afghanistan, transitioning through West Africa in Nigeria, and establishing operations in Kenya—Curt offers a grounded, practitioner's view of what it truly takes to build sustainable enterprises in dynamic economies. Together, they discuss moving past conventional assumptions, understanding local context, and developing the resilience required to thrive where others see insurmountable barriers. The Afghanistan thread matters. Someone who built a business there until the Taliban made it impossible, then picked themselves up and went to Nigeria, then Kenya — that is a person with a very specific kind of resilience and a very specific set of filters for what "difficult" actually means. Is Africa really difficult? Based on principles in my new book: https://a.co/d/01FbgINs Connect with Brett Johnson on social media: Facebook Instagram Twitter LinkedIn Visit brettjohnson.biz for articles, devotionals, and more.

In this episode, I’m joined by Anthony Farr, the founding CEO of the Allan Gray Orbis Foundation and the Allan & Gill Gray Philanthropy Africa. Anthony has spent years at the forefront of entrepreneurship in Africa, focusing on how we can foster high-impact leaders to drive systemic change. We dive into a critical shift in perspective: why the "ecosystem" is the true investment when it comes to de-risking opportunities on the continent. I share my thoughts on moving beyond capital alone, as we explore the power of partnership and the importance of building robust support structures that allow African entrepreneurs to thrive long-term. If you’re interested in the future of African investment and how a collaborative approach can unlock prosperity, you won't want to miss this conversation. Based on principles in my new book: https://a.co/d/01FbgINs Connect with Brett Johnson on social media: Facebook Instagram Twitter LinkedIn Visit brettjohnson.biz for articles, devotionals, and more.