One fund, ten companies, 1.1 billion servings

Almost two-thirds of people in Sub-Saharan Africa cannot afford a healthy diet. The businesses best placed to change that are the small and medium-sized enterprises that produce, process and distribute most of the continent’s food. Yet these are precisely the companies traditional lenders tend to overlook.

The Nutritious Foods Financing Facility (N3F) was built to close that gap. Managed by Incofin in partnership with the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), the fund places nutrition at the core of investment decision-making rather than treating it as a by-product of broader agricultural strategies. Today we publish the N3F 2025 Impact Report, covering the fund’s second year of operation.

A portfolio that doubled its reach

In 2025, N3F welcomed five new portfolio companies, bringing the total to ten SMEs across six countries. Tanzania and Uganda joined Zambia, Kenya, Rwanda and Senegal on the portfolio map. Since launch, the fund has disbursed USD 6.25 million across seven nutritious food value chains, from dairy and poultry to fortified flours and fresh food logistics.

The results speak plainly. Portfolio companies delivered approximately 1.1 billion nutritious food servings in 2025, up from 647.3 million the year before. These reached an estimated 7 million consumers, 72% of them from low- and middle-income households. Portfolio products were priced, on average, at 48% of the benchmark cost of their food group, keeping nutritious options within reach of the people who need them most.

Children at the centre

An estimated 46% of consumers reached in 2025 were children. The portfolio’s children inclusivity ratio of 1.03 shows that, collectively, N3F investees serve children in line with the population distribution, with companies such as Soy Afric and Good Nature Agro reaching an even higher share. N3F positions itself as a child-inclusive fund under the UNICEF Child-Lens Investing Framework, and GAIN has joined UNICEF’s new Community of Practice for Child-Lens Investing to help shape how investors consider children in their decisions.

The value chain effect

Some of the most important impact happens upstream. In 2025, 60% of total servings reached consumers through enabling services provided by portfolio companies: animal feed production, day-old chick supply and cold chain logistics. A day-old chick sold to a smallholder farmer becomes eggs and poultry meat on family tables months later. This is the systems approach at work, where investments across different segments of the value chain collectively improve the availability of nutritious food.

Beyond capital

Financing is half the story. GAIN leads the fund’s Technical Assistance facility, which has completed 12 projects with seven SMEs since 2024, with six more under way. The outputs are concrete: 64 standard operating procedures, policies and manuals developed, 48 staff members and 46 farmers trained, packaging redesigned to meet infant food standards, and governance tools that position family businesses for long-term growth.

Gender runs through the portfolio too. All ten investees meet at least one 2X Global criterion, five have a woman as owner or General Manager, and 638 women work across investee firms.

Building the field

The ambition extends beyond the portfolio. In October 2025, the partnership launched NutrInvest, a nutrition-lens investing framework built partly on N3F’s experience, giving DFIs, impact investors and fund managers a practical way to identify opportunities that deliver better nutrition outcomes.

As Myrtho Vlastou, N3F Fund Manager at Incofin, and Roberta Bove, Senior Lead Innovative Finance at GAIN, write in the foreword: “joining N3F is not simply an allocation decision, but a statement of intent.”