Mezuo O. Nwuneli
MANAGING PARTNER
Sahel Capital Agribusiness Managers Ltd.
Mezuo Nwuneli is an experienced private equity professional. He has over 25 years of private equity, investment banking, and corporate finance experience. Through his work he has raised and invested capital, and advised on mergers & acquisitions transactions across a range of industries. He has previously worked in the financial services, downstream petroleum, and telecommunications sectors. Since 2010, he has focused extensively on the food and agricultural sector in Africa. He has also actively contributed to the development of the impact investing ecosystem in Nigeria.
Mr. Nwuneli serves on the boards of the AACE Foods, Coscharis Farms, Crest Agro Products, First World Communities, Ladgroup, L&Z Integrated Farms, Sahel Capital, and Sahel Consulting. He previously served on the board of Nagode Industries. He is the Chairman/Co‐Founder of AACE Foods; Chair of the Strategy Committee at First World Communities; and Chair of the Finance and Audit Committee at Crest Agro Products.
Mr. Nwuneliserves on the investment committee of Fund for Agricultural Finance in Nigeria (“FAFIN”), a $66 million food and agriculture private equity fund managed by Sahel Capital; and on the credit committee of Lending for African Farming Company (“LAFCo”), a $20 million pan‐African SME agribusiness lender. He is also on the Nigeria National Advisory Board for Impact Investing, and is one of the founding members and a director of the Private Equity and Venture Capital Association, Nigeria (“PEVCA”).
Mr. Nwuneli started his career in corporate finance with Sabre Group in Dallas in 1995, and subsequently worked in J.P. Morgan & Co.’s mergers & acquisitions group in New York. He returned to Nigeria in 1999 and worked in various senior investment banking, principal investment, and corporate restructuring roles with SecTrust (now Afrinvest), Ocean & Oil Holdings, and MTS First Wireless. He joined AFIG Funds in Senegal in 2007 as a partner, and was part of the team that raised the firm’s debut $72m generalist private equity fund which invested in companies across West and Central Africa.
He Co‐Founded AACE Foods and Sahel Consulting in 2010, and established Sahel Capital in 2013. As Managing Partner of Sahel Capital, he led his team to raise $90 million in capital from institutional and sovereign investors for two separate food and agriculture private equity funds – FAFIN and Social Enterprise Fund for Agriculture in Africa (“SEFAA”), an impact fund investing across 13 sub‐Saharan African countries. He is actively involved investing capital from these funds into agribusinesses, many of which are family owned, and in the value creation plans of these companies.
He holds a Master in Business Administration (MBA) from the Harvard Business School and a B.Sc. in Industrial Management, with a minor in Information Systems, from Carnegie Mellon University.
He is an Eisenhower Fellow and is an Archbishop Tutu Fellow. He was honored by Harvard Business School in 2021 with its distinguished Alumni Achievement Award, and separately by the Harvard Business School Association of Nigeria in 2019. The firm he leads, Sahel Capital, wasselected asImpact Investor of the Year in 2019 by the Impact Investor Foundation in Nigeria.