Coffee With Tamer El Raghy on bringing climate-smart agriculture to Egypt

Acumen’s climate-focused agriculture fund is coming to Egypt for the first time. The Acumen Resilient Agriculture Fund (ARAF) — the impact fund known for backing fast-growing African agribusinesses building smallholder farmers’ climate resilience — has secured USD 90 mn in fresh committed capital. The top-up brings total fund size to roughly USD 148 mn and marks its first expansion beyond East and West Africa into North Africa. Egypt is one of three new target markets, and ARAF’s pitch here is specific: help move the country’s agriculture from exporting raw crops toward processed, branded goods.

The raise is backed by returning anchors and a fresh set of DFIs. The Green Climate Fund (GCF), FMO and Proparco all topped up existing commitments, joined by new investors Swedfund, BIO and FASA, alongside an undisclosed family office that also backed the first round.

Tamer El Raghy (LinkedIn) has led ARAF from day one. The Cairo University-trained engineer holds a PhD in materials engineering from Drexel, an MBA from NYU Stern, and nine patents from an earlier career as an academic and startup founder. He built his career at Cargill across grain, oilseeds, and animal feed in Africa and the Middle East, before heading agriculture and food private equity in Africa at a Zurich-based fund. He joined Acumen in November 2018 to launch ARAF and has run it out of Nairobi ever since.

We sat down with El Raghy to talk about why climate resilience, not just capital, is what turns African smallholders into lasting agribusinesses, the Kenyan farmer whose solar-powered irrigation pump changed the trajectory of her farm, and his vision for pushing Egypt up the value chain from raw crops to branded, processed goods.

Edited excerpts from our conversation:

EnterpriseAM: Your career took you through venture, consulting, and years at Cargill before you landed in impact investing. What actually pulled you into agrifood?

Tamer El Raghy: It happened almost by accident. I was an engineer, a professor for four years, then left academia to commercialize some patents, which is how I ended up in an MBA, then M&A consulting. Then Cargill called, needing someone to run strategy and investments in Africa. I had no ag experience and no Africa experience, but Cargill is an amazing school. Traveling the continent, I saw how a smallholder’s life changes when they work with the right company. That stuck with me because these are the people growing our food, yet they are the most exposed to climate change despite contributing almost nothing to it. When Acumen approached me about building a fund focused on farmers’ climate resilience, I said yes immediately.

An impact fund is still seeking risk-adjusted economic returns, like any fund. The difference is that it also carries an impact thesis it has to report against. ARAF hires a third party every year, funded through a grant from the Green Climate Fund, to measure how its portfolio companies are affecting smallholder farmers’ climate resilience.

EnterpriseAM: Before this round, ARAF had USD 58 mn committed. What’s actually changing with this expansion, and who’s backing it?

TE: The real shift is geographic. Before this round, we had USD 58 mn committed in 2021, focused entirely on East Africa and Anglophone West Africa — Nigeria and Ghana. This additional USD 90 mn lets us keep investing there while expanding into North Africa for the first time. We’re not just deploying more capital in the same markets — we’re testing whether the model travels somewhere we’ve never operated.

We have returning investors — GCF, Proparco, and FMO — all of whom topped up their existing commitments, plus new investors Swedfund, BIO, and FASA, and a family office that was also in our first round. On the numbers that are already public, GCF’s commitment includes USD 30 mn in equity, Proparco is in for USD 12 mn, FMO for USD 12.5 mn, and Swedfund for USD 12 mn.

EnterpriseAM: Why is Egypt only entering the picture now?

TE: We started narrow on purpose, focusing on East Africa and Anglophone West Africa, to prove the model before raising a bigger fund. Once we decided to double the fund’s size, GCF asked us to name focus countries, and Egypt and Morocco were an obvious choice for North Africa. For Francophone West Africa, we needed a beachhead, and the Ivory Coast’s agriculture sector is large, structured, and comparable in scale to Egypt’s.

Not many people realize how big Egypt’s agriculture sector is, or how much of it is still built around smallholder farmers. We think there’s a long way to go from exporting raw materials to exporting processed goods, and that’s the role we’d like to play. When we explained North Africa’s potential to our investors, all of them got excited about its scale. As it stands, we’ll be the first ag-and-food-focused fund in North Africa.

EnterpriseAM: Is there a moment that crystallized why this work matters to you?

TE: There’s one Kenyan farmer in particular who comes to mind. After working domestic jobs in Nairobi for years, she inherited land and returned home to plant corn. She struggled because corn doesn’t pay well and, without irrigation, a bad rain season can wipe out a harvest. She got a call about a solar-powered irrigation pump from SunCulture, an ARAF portfolio company. She ignored it at first, thinking it was a scam, but eventually decided to visit the store. She couldn’t afford the down payment, so her son, working as a barista in Dubai, sent her the money. She told us she didn’t know how to write a business plan, so she drew her farm instead — corn to eat, along with coffee, hibiscus, and fish. Then, she redrew it every single year to track her progress. Three years later, her farm looked exactly like her drawing, and her mud hut is now a brick house.

That story is part of why the fund’s own impact data shows more than 80% of farmers working with ARAF’s portfolio companies reporting a rise in income.

EnterpriseAM: What does that raw-to-processed shift actually look like in practice?

TE: Take a company like Beyond Good in our current portfolio. It sources cocoa from smallholders in Madagascar and Uganda and turns it into a fully branded, organic chocolate bar sold entirely in the US. That’s the model: not just growing and shipping the raw material, but capturing the value that comes from turning it into something branded and exported as a finished product. That’s exactly the kind of company we’d love to replicate in Egypt. With this fund, we can wear two hats: venture and private equity, so we’re looking at both early-stage startups and established businesses that could follow that path.

But none of that happens unless you first fix what’s holding farmers back. Egyptian farmers face the same four pain points as farmers anywhere across the continent. First, access to finance, because banks see smallholders as risk rather than customers. Second, access to the right inputs. Third, access to markets, since most rely on aggregators rather than selling directly. And fourth, access to agronomy support — the kind of guidance a US commercial farmer gets from a paid app and satellite data, but a farmer with one or two acres simply doesn’t.

EnterpriseAM: There’s a perception that agriculture and food is a hard sector to make money in. Does that track with what you’ve seen?

TE: It’s not true, and I think it’s part of why the sector has a reputation problem. People make money in agriculture and food all the time — in Egypt, across Africa, and globally. What’s true is that it isn’t an easy sector for the faint-hearted. If you invest in a company making t-shirts, a bad month is a bad month. If you invest in a company that buys from farmers and there’s a heat wave, yield drops and that ripples straight through the business. The gap between a resilient farmer and a non-resilient one can be the difference between a good season and losing everything.

EnterpriseAM: You run a technical assistance facility alongside the equity fund. Where does the grant money go?

TE: It’s a grant facility, funded by GCF and other partners, that we manage as a pass-through, separate from the equity fund. It does three things. First, it pays for the third-party impact measurement I mentioned. Second, it funds farmer training on climate-smart practices, including seminars and access to subject-matter experts. Third, and this is the one our portfolio companies love most, it funds business development support. If a founder needs an ERP system that costs USD 40k but would rather spend that money hiring salespeople, we might cover 75% of it. If a company expanding from Egypt into Morocco needs a go-to-market strategist, we pay for the consultant. And if a promising mid-level manager needs an executive coach, we bring in one of the best, not a “half-cooked” one.

EnterpriseAM: Given the water-scarcity and heat-stress outlook for Egyptian agriculture, are climate risk products, like crop ins., for instance, something you’re actively pursuing?

TE: Egypt’s climate risk is fairly concentrated around temperature rather than rainfall or wind, which actually makes a heat-stress ins. product more tractable to design. We already backed a parametric weather-insurance company, IBISA, in our first fund, and we’ll keep looking at crop ins. We’d love to be part of building that, whether it’s a company already operating in Egypt or one looking to expand there.

EnterpriseAM: What does success look like for ARAF’s Egypt bet three years from now?

TE: Three things: that we’re backing good companies with real, measurable impact on smallholder farmers; that ARAF becomes known as the go-to agrifood fund in the region; and that we prove — just as we did in East and West Africa — that the best local talent is already here and we don’t need to import it. Every member of our team is local. We like to say we’re an African fund, managed by Africans, out of Africa.