Up to 50% of Kenya's fruits and vegetables never reach a plate. Not because farmers can't grow. Because nobody can reliably move, sort, price and pay.

Claire van Enk is the founder and CEO of Farm to Feed, a Nairobi-based agritech platform that today connects 6,000 smallholder farmers with hotels, restaurants, schools and food processors across Kenya through bespoke logistics, traceability and a 200-SKU catalogue that includes "grade rescue" produce too imperfect for conventional buyers. The business started as a COVID-era GoFundMe in 2020. Five years and one commercial pivot later, it is one of the most ambitious operational businesses in East African food.

In this episode of The Samuele Tini Show, Claire makes a case that cuts against most of the African startup conversation: the continent does not need more cloud-based platforms. It needs warehouses, trucks, cold rooms and the unglamorous logistics that physically move food from a farm to a kitchen. Investors prefer asset-light businesses. The real bottleneck is physical.

We talk about the fragmented food system, the multiplier effect on rural employment, the limits of traceability in a country with weak pesticide regulation, and the "Africa discount" that keeps Kenyan products underpriced on global markets. Claire also shares the hardest founder lesson of her journey: realising she had to stop being an entrepreneur and start being a CEO, and that the two are not the same job.

A direct, honest conversation about food systems, climate-resilient supply chains, and what it really takes to build operational businesses in Africa.

What if the obsession driving the global economy is not a strategy, but a religion?

In this episode, Professor Tim Jackson (University of Surrey, author of Prosperity Without Growth, Post Growth, and The Care Economy) argues that GDP has filled "the God-shaped hole" left in the 20th century, becoming a creed we recite without questioning. Sam and Tim explore where this obsession came from, why technology alone cannot decouple growth from environmental damage, and how a different organising principle, care, could replace growth as the engine of the economy.

Tim makes the case that prosperity was never about income. It was about health, balance, and the ability to thrive within limits. Drawing on Wangari Maathai, Ubuntu, and the autonomic nervous system as a metaphor for governance, he reframes the role of rich countries: not to help the Global South, but to take their foot off the accelerator.

A conversation about economics, philosophy, indigenous wisdom, and the kind of business worth building.

"There is no funding gap in Africa."

That is the provocation from Burak Buyuksaraç, CEO of Afri Capital and a 16-year business veteran in Tanzania. He arrived in Dar es Salaam in 2010 as a mining executive, stayed to build a diversified portfolio across tourism, security, insurance, consultancy and trading, and now runs one of East Africa's newer investment firms.

In this episode we unpack why the real bottleneck in African SME finance is not capital but pipeline. Why smaller tickets are harder to raise than larger ones. Why Tanzanian banks demand 125% collateral for a loan. And why Burak sees Africa and Latin America as the only two regions left on the planet with genuine room to grow.

Burak shares two recent Afri Capital deals: a $15M refinancing for an Arusha agro-processor and a $3.5M facility for a Tanzanian bank servicing the education ecosystem.

Essential listening for founders, impact investors, DFI teams and anyone working on SME finance in emerging markets.