Feeding Angola from the ground up
That capital does not stop at one crop or one country. Back in Angola, the case for investing in farming is written into the land itself.
FSDEA backs agricultural businesses at home and elsewhere in Africa as part of a diversified alternative-investment strategy. The Fund’s 2025 Annual Report records an overall alternative-investment return of 42%, with agriculture, mining and health among the sectors that drove performance.
The country holds around 35 million hectares of arable land, and cultivates 10 to 15% of it. It still imports roughly half its food, and the shortfall is felt at home, with almost six in 10 households experiencing food insecurity in 2025. That is beginning to change.
Agriculture and fisheries have grown from about 6% of Angola’s GDP in 2010 to 15% in recent years, and the World Bank now puts agriculture, forestry and fishing at around 16% of the economy. It has become one of the main engines of the country’s push to diversify away from oil.
EMIRAIS is one answer to that gap. An Angolan agribusiness in Waku Kungo that FSDEA also invests in, it’s something very different from a young berry farm. EMIRAIS is a vertically integrated poultry operation more than 15 years in the making, and it shows the same approach carried into industrial scale. Vertical integration is where a single company owns or controls multiple stages of the supply chain – such as hatcheries, feed mills, processing plants and distribution.
Efraim Hilf, the company’s director of planning and new business, counts its growth in multiples of 10. EMIRAIS grows its own maize, mills its own feed, hatches and raises its own birds, and Hilf says its expanding operations to supply fast food restaurants in Angola.
What made that possible, Hilf says, was the fund coming in as a shareholder, after the company had tried other routes to growth and found them closed.
“The main thing is money, and we need money. Being a shareholder gave us the ability to approach the local banks and to get the incentives the government grants. Without FSDEA, it was impossible to do it.”
As at Mashare, the real investment is in people. Hilf says EMIRAIS employs around 700 staff directly and supports at least 200 more indirectly — making it the largest employer in its district — and it plans to bring dormant small-producer chicken houses back into use and to train the next generation of Angolan supervisors. Hilf compares the operation to that of a high-tech company and sees the model travelling across Angola and beyond.