Making Nutrition Investment Visible
Client: GAIN and N3F
Services: Conceptualization, scripting, filming, photography, and editing.
Three businesses. Three countries. One question: what happens when nutritious food businesses get the capital and support they need to grow?
The Nutritious Foods Financing Facility (N3F), led by the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) and Incofin Investment Management, was created to address a persistent gap in African food systems: nutritious food businesses often have the potential to grow, but lack access to the right kind of finance and technical support.
GAIN brought Marula in to document what that support looks like on the ground.
Rather than creating a film that simply explained how the fund works, we built the story around three businesses in three different countries: Soy Afric in Kenya, Good Nature Agro in Zambia and Couvoir Amar in Senegal.
The challenge
N3F combines financing with technical assistance to help small and medium-sized food enterprises strengthen their businesses while increasing the availability, affordability and quality of nutritious food.
That is a complex story to communicate.
Our challenge was to make the model understandable: to move from explaining investment structures and technical assistance to showing what they actually mean inside a business.
Our approach
We structured the documentary around the people and businesses experiencing the change. Each SME became a story within the larger N3F story, with a different focus on how finance and technical assistance were being used.
In Kenya, we followed Soy Afric, where N3F working capital supported the purchase of soybean raw materials and technical assistance helped strengthen financial processes and quality systems.
In Zambia, Good Nature Agro gave us an opportunity to explore the gender dimension of the programme. Technical assistance focused on identifying barriers to women taking on field leadership roles and developing a Gender Action Plan. Here change was already noticeable: women’s representation among Field Supervisors reached 35%, above the 30% target.
In Senegal, Couvoir Amar showed another side of the model. N3F supported new infrastructure and equipment, while technical assistance focused on biosecurity. The company developed an action plan to address identified risks and brought in a dedicated manager to lead biosecurity.
Together, the three stories show that investment is not only about capital. It can also be about strengthening systems, building capacity and creating the conditions for businesses to become more resilient.
From the factory floor to the field
We wanted the audience to understand the work through images as much as through interviews.
At Soy Afric, that meant production equipment, raw materials, laboratory processes and the people managing the business.
At Good Nature Agro, it meant moving beyond the office and into the field following extension workers, farmers and the people involved in building more inclusive leadership pathways.
At Couvoir Amar, it meant showing the infrastructure, biosecurity practices and new production facilities that the investment helped make possible.
The result was a documentary built around people, places and processes, rather than abstract explanations of finance.
What Marula delivered
Marula developed and produced a documentary package designed to work across different audiences and platforms:
A 3–5 minute N3F documentary
Short-form films focused on individual SMEs and areas of support
High-quality photography from each country
Motion graphics and infographics explaining the N3F model and impact
Digital formats for website, social media and events
The project was designed to support GAIN's fundraising and investor engagement while also giving the SMEs themselves stories they could use to communicate their work.
Let’s Tell Your Impact Story
At Marula, we’re committed to stories that matter. For GAIN and N3F we were able to combine documentary filmmaking with social impact storytelling, capturing moments where policy meets people, and where community-led solutions create real change.
If you’re working on programmes around creating impact, we’d love to help you capture the work in an authentic, compelling way: info@marula-agency.com
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