Empowering Smallholder Farmers Through Financial Innovation and Market Connectivity

As Africa increasingly faces the impact of climate change, food security will become a primary focal point for policymakers and market participants. Lack of food would cause severe disruption and instability.

Smallholder farmers are responsible for most of the local agricultural production, and yet they receive only a small part of the investments in the sector.  

We believe that strengthening market linkages within local supply chains is the best way to help smallholder farmers thrive in Sub-Saharan Africa, connecting large established companies with local small producers.

We achieve this by focusing on the financial stability of these larger, local companies by affording them access to international credit markets beyond their national bank lenders; we help them become more investment-ready.

Ensuring their financial stability helps them to continue buying from local, small producers. This provides small producers with some stability, which allows them to incorporate more regenerative forms of farming and new techniques to deal with the changing climate while ensuring that the revenues remain stable.

This innovation is the result of trial and error and various government-funded research programmes.  

Our Services

Partnership model

Our partnership model is unique in the development finance space. Our “originate to distribute” approach mirrors conventional and proven capital market techniques. On the origination side, we work with a handful of carefully selected local advisory firms that act as our “feet on the ground” in our core market of Sub-Saharan Africa. On the distribution side, the MS core team engages with an existing network of lenders whose lending criteria are clearly understood. Only companies that match these criteria are brought to these lenders.

Each advisor has proven experience in all aspects of the due diligence and the fundraising process. Their role is to source agricultural companies in their regions that fit our basic credit investor criteria.  

The core team at MS Innovation Lab works with individual advisors during the preparatory work before any interaction with investors.

This approach enables MS Innovation Lab to work across various countries while using the same investment criteria in their search for bankable transactions.

Our team

Our team is a mix of capital markets, business development, and entrepreneurial professionals. We enter each project as a scientist who enters a laboratory, seeking a creative new solution within a disciplined and pragmatic system. We are relentlessly unconventional in thinking and reimagine how our clients can succeed. Having worked across industries and geographies, we have delivered value to a wide range of clients and are not intimidated by challenging situations.

Arleen Mitchell

Arleen's 20 years of entrepreneurial ventures have helped lay the groundwork for the newly relaunched MS Innovation Lab. Before her relocation to Europe, she worked as an independent strategy consultant for seven years between New York and Sub-Saharan Africa, working with a wide range of investors supporting and expanding agribusinesses in East Africa as well as various early-stage and startup ventures. Before this, she worked for 3 years with a New York-based medical device company where she was responsible for and executed the company's capital raising efforts to support its clinical trials. Previous to this role, she was an in-house advisor to a family office in New York, where she was tasked with deal origination and due diligence, which led to several successful acquisitions in the area of women's wear. She also worked for a NY-based family foundation where she led the foundation's work in the area of arts and education; she located, analyzed and executed grant agreements. Looking to change career paths after a successful career in the music industry, where she was a composer, producer and business manager and worked for some of the largest media and music companies in the world, she successfully started and later sold a baked goods company in New York.

Steve Rocco

Steve brings more than 20 years of experience in finance across a wide range of areas, including traditional capital markets and SME finance, as well as pioneering entrepreneurial work in impact investing.

In a consulting/advisory role, Steve has recently worked on a series of innovative projects. Steve has advised an NGO consultancy working in the blue economy sector on its transformation to an investment banking operation focused on emerging market SMEs working in the blue economy in Asia. Recently, he assisted Tibanna-Biomethane AG develop its business clean kitchen model, partnership development strategy and funding pathway for its biomethan plants planned for multiple islands across the global south. Steve was also part of the Pipeline Builder project, an innovative SME funding advisory business funded by the UN SDG lab at the UN in Geneva.

As an entrepreneur, Steve was co-founder of Mission Markets, a pioneering fintech startup which provided impact companies and funds with capital raising services via an online platform, prior to crowdfunding. He was also CFO/COO while the company grew to a dozen employees. With ByFusion, a waste-to-use startup focused on plastics, Steve was acting CFO.

In investment banking, Steve has worked in capital markets in New York across most asset classes in various institutional sales/relationship management roles. He began his banking career in corporate finance.

In asset management, Steve has worked both as a portfolio manager and in a sales and marketing role, most recently with MainStreet Partners, a London-based advisor focused on Italian institutional investors.

Steve has a master’s degree in international finance and business from Columbia University’s School of International Affairs and a BA in international political economy from UC Berkeley.