In a RootsToFoods Capital Series interview, Kanini Mutooni of the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation follows one Kenyan cold-chain company from DRK’s first check to the path to financial sustainability, and Dr. Frank Aswani of the African Venture Philanthropy Alliance explains what it would take for ten more to do the same.
Ovidiu Bujorean, chief executive officer of OviBees Ventures, spoke with Kanini Mutooni, Africa Director and Senior Managing Director at the Draper Richards Kaplan (DRK) Foundation, and Dr. Frank Aswani, chief executive officer of the African Venture Philanthropy Alliance (AVPA), for the fifth conversation of Wave 2 of the RootsToFoods Capital Series, and the series’ first with two guests. DRK, a venture philanthropy fund, backs early-stage social entrepreneurs with up to $300,000 in unrestricted, multi-year funding; Mutooni leads its investment sourcing across Africa from Nairobi. When DRK backs a founder with a limited track record, she said, it looks for a solution designed for the right problem, a founder resilient and open enough to take feedback from a very hands-on investor, and one who understands what raising the next round will take.
AVPA works on the other side of the table. It does not back entrepreneurs directly; it works with the investors who fund them, helping them deploy capital “better, faster, cheaper and with more impact,” Aswani said. It builds investors’ capabilities, connects them to investable pipeline through a deal-share platform, and has launched an AI data tool that tracks capital flows across the continent, from the instruments in use in each sector to where catalytic capital is going. The aim is to “drive private capital where on its own it wouldn’t go”: rural areas, youth, women and overlooked sectors.
Their two roles meet in the deal. AVPA’s members are typically the investors DRK co-invests with, and within that network, Mutooni said, expectations on impact and return are clear from the start. Aswani described the other direction: AVPA amplifies proofs of concept from pioneering investors such as DRK and connects them to follow-on providers of debt and equity, so early backers can exit and companies can scale. “I don’t think AVPA can do without us,” Mutooni said, “and we can’t do without AVPA.”
Mutooni walked through one DRK investment as an example: Keep IT Cool, a Kenyan company providing solar-powered cold storage and cold-chain logistics to fishing communities. When DRK found it, the company was only just generating revenue, had a single, hands-off Japanese venture investor on its cap table and had never raised further institutional capital. It had no board, no talent strategy and no clear unit economics yet, and its model was capital-intensive. “A lot of impact investors in our ecosystem run away from anything that sounds capex heavy,” she said. “For us, we were attracted because we felt this was a really difficult problem to solve.”
DRK backed the founders, local entrepreneurs who had lived the problem and, in DRK’s view, designed exactly the right solution for it. It invested through a convertible note, its usual instrument when an early-stage valuation is hard to set, then did the hands-on work: financial modeling, a talent strategy and hiring, forming a board and setting KPIs. “When people see DRK on a cap table, they know that we’re going to do a lot of the hands-on work,” she said. Within about 18 months, three new catalytic impact investors had joined. DRK also helped the Japanese investor, which had no team on the ground, understand what the company needed; that investor later sold its stake, Mutooni said, out of confidence that Keep IT Cool was in the right hands.
About two years after DRK’s investment, Keep IT Cool was named one of the five winners of the 2024 Earthshot Prize, taking the £1 million Build a Waste-Free World award at the ceremony in Cape Town. Roughly two and a half to three years after DRK backed it at pre-seed, the company is on the path to financial sustainability. The founders, Mutooni said, “look completely different” from the people on her first call. “They are such resilient human beings.”
“We’re not short of money. We’re short of risk capital.” Dr. Frank Aswani, Chief Executive Officer, African Venture Philanthropy Alliance
AVPA’s network was not involved in the Keep IT Cool investment, but Aswani sees its journey as a pattern to repeat across the continent. Africa holds about $4 trillion in domestic assets against an annual financing gap for the Sustainable Development Goals of about $300 billion, he said; what is missing is the risk capital that crowds in private investors. AVPA is building catalytic capital collaboratives in which funders pool money, pipeline and risk, with about 30 percent of the seats reserved for African players who learn by doing, sitting in on investment decisions and the tranching of payments.
With aid budgets cut, he said, more grant makers are asking how to multiply their money, and African organizations are building models that can sustain themselves. “We don’t necessarily want free things. We want affordable, reliable services,” he said. “And if your business can give us one of those, it will grow and thrive.” He also sees “a lot more domestic capital willing to come into the impact space, more than we’ve ever seen before.”
Both pointed to changes already under way. Mutooni said that a decade ago as much as 80 percent of a pipeline she reviewed could be led by expatriate founders; DRK now invests only in founders local to the context they serve, which she calls “a risk mitigation strategy,” and she is seeing more women founders as more women make investment decisions. Aswani said businesses serving customers who earn under $5 a day are proving profitable, and that capital is being directed beyond South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria to markets such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burkina Faso and Benin. “If your model can work in Africa, it’s globally scalable,” he said.
Asked what they would accelerate, both gave the same answer without comparing notes: more hands-on catalytic investors. “Once we have more hands-on catalytic investors like DRK,” Mutooni said, “we will start to create true generational wealth on this continent through entrepreneurship.” Her fix for moving capital faster was practical: “Let’s all stop doing our own separate diligence. Let’s do joint diligence together.” Aswani’s was to “start small, fail fast, fail cheaply, build the evidence.”
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Kanini Mutooni and Dr. Frank Aswani spoke with Ovidiu Bujorean, chief executive officer of OviBees Ventures and host and designer of the RootsToFoods Capital Series, for Episode 10 of the series, the fifth episode of Wave 2. Mutooni is Africa Director and Senior Managing Director at the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation. Aswani is chief executive officer of the African Venture Philanthropy Alliance, which holds its 2026 annual conference in Cape Town from 9 to 11 November. The views expressed are their own. The first edition of Capital In Motion, with insights from an early-stage company, Keep IT Cool, follows on 5 November, and the series’ companion pieces are collected at rootstofoods.com . RootsToFoods Capital Series is produced by OviBees Ventures, with AV Ventures, an ACDI/VOCA affiliate, as founding partner, and is distributed in partnership with AllAfrica Global Media.
Follow the rest of Wave 2 by subscribing to the Capital Deployment newsletter on LinkedIn, and find every episode, Capital Insight Brief and Capital In Motion edition at rootstofoods.com .
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Listen to this episode on Podbean: rootstofoods.podbean.com/e/africa-isn-t-short-of-money-it-s-short-of-risk-capital-kanini-mutooni-drk-dr-frank-aswani-avpa
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