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to help food growers in
Sierra Leone overcome hunger.

9 out of 10 farmers

in Sierra Leone
can't feed their families

30% of children

face malnutrition

One quarter

of the country's tree cover land was lost to farming in 8 years

All farmers

slash & burn their farms

Moving beyond subsistence.
Sinking carbon in the soils.

Regenerative farming helps farmers overcome hunger and poverty. Foop bundles the right inputs and mechanization services, so that food growers can farm more land, protect their soils, and produce more food.

No-till planting protects and helps regenerate the soils
Crop rotation enhances the farming ecosystem
Increased organic matter results in carbon sunk in the soils
Increased yields mean more food and income for growers

Foop

Impact 2023

1,567

farmers
escape hunger

1,300

acres under regenerative agriculture

1.5x

farmer income per USD invested

57%

farmers
are women

Why foop.
A solution designed after 10 years of in-country experience.

Foop was launched by the founders of Warc Africa, a social enterprise focused on supporting smallholders in West Africa. The founders gathered invaluable experience by operating in the country and the region uninterruptedly since 2011. Through Warc Africa, they developed a strong network of international funders, research institutions, and other supporters, and through a decade long local presence, very strong links to many communities.

Low farming yields, unpredictable weather, lack of mechanization and poor infrastructure pushes farmers to extreme poverty and hunger. Profitable commercial farming is out of reach and despite efforts by all political parties, Sierra Leone has failed to attract meaningful investment in the agricultural sector. Smallholders in Sierra Leone are hungrier, poorer and more isolated than its peers in most other African countries.

01 / Deeper
Social Impact

02 / Environmental Impact

03 / Scalability

Our model goes beyond distributing inputs. Rather than supporting farmers with the traditional manual tasks of farming, we provide farmers the ability to cultivate more land and increase yields. The resulting impact is significantly higher than comparative models.

We are in a quest to make regenerative agriculture in Africa the norm. All farmers adopt crop rotation and no-till planting, which helps the soils to regenerate, prevents carbon dioxide from being released and reduces diesel use by 60%.

We run foop with the support of Warc, who has commercial farming experience in Sierra Leone since 2011. The knowledge, management and infrastructure for Warc its used by FOOP free of charge, maximizing the social return of every dollar invested in foop.

About us

What are we doing differently?

Hungry farmers are an unacceptable incongruence. foop empowers below-subsistence growers by designing and selling at a very low-cost regenerative farming inputs as a service, enabling farmers to access the best available machinery, agricultural practices, and technical advice to increase their food production. foop focuses only on staple crops. The bundle is sold to the grower on credit to recover part of the costs of delivering the product and be able to accelerate the path to scale.

Crop rotation

No-till
mechanization

Yield increase

Markets

Enables farmers to move away from the unsustainable practice of monoculture, diversify products and market risk by having two seasons of two different crops, and increasing the utilization rate of their land from 5 to 10 months.

The provision of best-in-class mechanization services (e.g. no-till planting, harvesting) allows farmers to move away from low-value, labor intensive tasks. This brings the benefit of conservation-enhancing no-till farming practices, increases the total cultivated land and frees up time to embark on additional income generating activities (e.g. poultry or vegetable production).

The use of better inputs (e.g. good seeds, fertilizers), data and science drives increased yields in the system. We train the farmers through a high-touch extension network.

We provide market information to farmers and help them access those markets. We also guarantee the purchase of their entire production, while not obliging them to sell their produce to us, providing further market freedom to maximize prices with limited risk.

Our People

The Founder

Emiliano founded WARC in 2011 and has lived in Sierra Leone since then. He is a multi-lingual entrepreneur, with experience as a corporate manager at a Fortune 500’s headquarters in Germany where he managed a portfolio of €60m and was selected as top manager. He holds a Master in International Management from ESADE University and Universität zu Köln, a BA in Business Economics from UTDT, completed the Stanford SEED program in 2018 , and speaks 5 languages fluently. He lives in Sierra Leone since 2011 and has visited over 72 countries.

The Trustees

Meghan Curran: Meghan is the West Africa Director for Acumen, where she sets strategy, oversees investing and leadership programs, and leads business development for the organization’s work in the region. Meghan joined Acumen in 2013 and led the global Talent function before relocating to West Africa in 2018. Meghan’s commitment to market-driven approaches to tackling poverty is rooted in her experience as a Peace Corps Volunteer in rural Guatemala, after which she facilitated loans and created a financial literacy program for Grameen America. Meghan holds an MBA from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, a bachelor’s degree from American University in Political Science, and is fluent in Spanish.

Cristián Cardoner: Cristián is a long-time supporter of WARC and provides strategic advice. He is a seasoned social entrepreneur and impact investor. As such, he founded DAP – a 20,000 ha farm in Paraguay, Andesat a company that connect rural towns to the digital world in South America, and holds a group of telco companies in Chile and France. He is a Member of the Board of Advisors at the Global Foodbanking Network, Partner at Acumen and Shareholder of Everytable. Previously, he held different senior banking positions in New York and Buenos Aires.