Komaza - Afrikan Heroes

Kenyan Forestry Platform Komaza Raises $9.5M To Increase Forest Cover

December 9, 2022

Komaza, an innovative smallholder forestry platform that offers scalable and sustainable nature-based solutions to climate change, has received renewed support from Mirova, a Natixis Investment Managers subsidiary that is 100% dedicated to sustainable investing. Komaza will be able to expand operations in Kenya thanks to the $US 9.5 million investment.

For the past 15 years, Komaza has been building its smallholder forestry programme. Since the program’s beginning, Komaza has worked with 25,000 farmers to plant 8,000,000 trees, increasing Kenya’s total tree cover by 9,500 ha.

The Komaza strategy entails working together with a sizable network of smallholder farmers to plant trees on lands that have been degraded in coastal Kenya. As part of the relationship, Komaza offers top-notch seedlings, forestry know-how, farmer training programmes, and access to the wood market, ensuring that partner farmers receive cash payments. In exchange, farmers give Komaza a portion of their unused land and labour to prepare the soil for planting trees and to care for the trees up until harvest, which is done by Komaza’s skilled workers. Komaza is creating a tech platform to manage its entire value chain activities in order to scale up this innovative model and manage the operational complexity.

Late in 2019, Komaza expanded into central Kenya, where the firm noticed a significant interest in the programme from nearby farmers.

The new funding from Mirova’s sustainable land-use strategy aims to fill the structural wood deficit in the country while producing beneficial environmental and social effects: prevent land degradation over 25,000 ha by planting new trees; give 60,000 smallholder farmers an additional source of income; sequester 2 million tonnes of carbon.

“We are excited to accelerate scaling our sustainable smallholder forestry and innovative platform to combat the climate crisis with continued support from Mirova. As our first senior loan, this investment is a critical financing milestone for Komaza in diversifying the source of financing and strengthening the capital structure,” MASASHI MOTOHASHI, Corporate Finance Manager at Komaza, said.

“Following our first investment in July 2020, we are very proud to renew our support to the development of Komaza. Their unique microforestry model brings reforestation and carbon sequestration at scale while improving the livelihoods of tens of thousands of smallholder farmers,” JOHANN FOURGEAUD, Investment Director at Mirova, said.

Komaza forestry platform Komaza forestry platform

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Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert.
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard. You can book a session and speak with him using the link: https://insightsbyexperts.com/view_expert/charles-rapulu-udoh

How Komaza, Tech-Enabled Forestry Startup Raised $28M Series B Fund

July 17, 2020

If Africa will rise to take its place as the world’s most arable continent, efforts to restore the fast degrading forestry and ensure a sustainable utilization of forestry resources is imperative. This is the mission behind Komaza, a tech-enabled, sustainable forestry startup focusing on ways to help restore wasted lands in the continent. To this end, Komaza has secured a first close of $28m of the company’s planned $33m Series B equity financing to plant one billion trees by 2030, benefiting over 2 million farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa and doubling existing tree cover across all operating landscapes.

Komaza says the Series A was co-led by Novastar LPs AXA Investment Managers through the AXA Impact Fund: Climate & Biodiversity, and the Dutch development bank FMO, with further participation by Mirova’s Land Degradation Neutrality Fund. According to Tevis Howard, Komaza’s Founder and CEO, “At Komaza, our vision is to become Africa’s largest forestry company, by partnering with farmers to provide a sustainable and hyper-scalable domestic supply of wood. As a result, farmers get a climate-resilient, zero-risk, source of wealth creation for their families, and investors get commercial returns, all while relieving the intense pressure on remaining natural forests.”

The Kenya-based company has planted over 6 million trees with 25,000 smallholder farmers to date, with annual plantings nearly doubling Kenya’s rate of commercial tree planting. Komaza’s “microforestry” model represents a paradigm shift in the industry from large, costly plantations to distributed partnerships with local farmers. This shift yields an 80% cost disruption vs traditional plantations for every acre planted, while unlocking dramatically more land for forestry activities, especially those held by farmers around major cities.

While distributed operations increase management complexity, Komaza has tackled these planning and coordination challenges using AI and satellite data to map existing tree growth and real-time mobile apps on the ground to track farmer progress.

Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry