CAPE TOWN — Bob Geldof’s 8 Miles African private equity fund has made its first investment, backing a start-up company that plans to build commodity exchanges across Africa and improve food security.
Reuters
The rock star activist’s US$200 million fund has joined Morgan Stanley and the International Finance Corporation, in providing a total of US$5 million of seed capital in eleni LLC, co-founded by Eleni Gabre-Madhin, the former head of the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange.
Gabre-Madhin set up Kenya-based eleni in January with the intention of levelling the playing field for African farmers in need of greater price transparency as they contend with powerful and better-informed market participants.
“We have closed [an agreement] this week with the 8 Miles fund,” she said at the World Economic Forum on Africa last week.
Gabre-Madhin aims to challenge the dominance of the world’s commodity markets by exchanges based in developed nations.
“It’s time the world looked to our markets as a reference,” she said. “There’s no reason why we shouldn’t have a west African cotton index that the world refers to, or an east African coffee index or African sesame seed index.”
