We have some exciting developments at Impacc: new ventures, new partners, new media coverage. And a surprise about who the fastest growing aid organisation of the last few years has been*…
*spoiler: it’s us
Our investments are turning into real impact. In 2024, it consisted of 9 Start-Ups across 5 Industries in 4 different countries. I am happy to report that 2025 shows no signs of slacking off. In fact, we have now transferred 150,000 USD to support MG Electromechanical Engineering (the maker of bakery machines in Tigray, Ethiopia), and 90,000 USD to Malaica to help them make the pregnancy journey safe and affordable for millions across East Africa.
Our partnership with Malaica is kicking off.
Coming soon: More Ventures, More Impact.
Over the past few months, we’ve been working hard to strengthen our portfolio – and we’re now on the verge of closing a new partnership that we’re particularly excited about. Our newest venture is built around a smart, scalable model to improve access to healthcare in East Africa. It creates new jobs, brings essential medical services closer to where people live – and hits right at the heart of our mission. More on that very soon!
We are also in the last stages of signing a deal with an agriculture startup in Tanzania that provides soil testing services as well as inputs for smallholder farmers. I don’t want to get carried away, so I will share details only once the ink is dry and the money is in their bank, but I very much look forward to our array into Tanzania, a country that’s especially close to my heart because it’s where I spent time on the continent first on my honeymoon and then living in a township near Kilimanjaro to help women with HIV/Aids set up small businesses. It feels good to be back!
We have good news on the funding side of things as well: we have signed donation contracts with Barthel foundation (which, as an environmental foundation, partners with us to build a green portfolio of sustainable startups across East Africa) as well as a corporate cooperation with Frosta, market leader in frozen foods (and a hero of mine ever since they took the big and near-fatal business risk to go additives-free twenty years ago), to support startups along their agricultural value chain, starting with Irrihub.
Felix Ahlers from FRoSTA AG and I happily signing our new partnership.
What’s also cool is that the media are beginning to show more interest in our model. Africa really isn’t top of mind for most people, and development stories even less. But when Donald Trump single-handedly shut down the world’s biggest donor, USAID, earlier on this year, and European countries started to divert their aid budgets into buying tanks, a new question came up: if traditional aid is dead (and if what’s left should be reserved for life-saving humanintarian aid), then what are the alternatives? And this in turn has led Germany’s largest evening news, Tagesthemen, to commission a feature on Impacc which aired in early June and was probably watched by 2mio people across Germany. Even more encouraging as an interview I did with CNBC Africa, the continent’s biggest business channel, that had a refreshing focus on the opportunities of African businesses to solve their own problems.
Interview for the german news “Tagesthemen” showing our partnership with Irri-Hub in Nairobi.
And finally, a statistic that I didn’t see coming: Impacc has been Germany’s fastest-growing aid organization in the last few years. Of the approximately 150 aid organizations registered with the German Donation Seal (DZI), Impacc experienced the fastest growth in donations since 2020 with an average annual growth of 145 percent. By comparison, the average for all organizations is 6 percent. As every parent of a baby knows it’s easier to grow when you are still small – but being the fastest of the lot is still an incredible sign of support for our model. Thank you for helping us get there. And with that, let us get back to finding and supporting even more ventures in 2025 and help them create even more jobs.
