Equitable and inclusive cold-chains – putting the vision into practice

Cold-chains are vital to health, food security and economic well-being and in the Global North form an established critical infrastructure underpinning a modern developed nation. Here they are taken for granted with, for example, more than 60% of food being moved from source to fork through a fully integrated temperature-controlled environment. In stark contrast, the lack of cold-chains in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are a key driver of the loss of more than 37% of all food produced, equivalent to 120-170 kg per capita annually, with consequences for nutrition, health and livelihoods.

At the Clean Cooling Network (CCN) and the Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold-Chain (ACES), we talk about a holistic approach to building equitable and resilient cold-chains in the Global South, particularly Africa. But what are our key pillars of action to put this vision into practice?

Africa has more than 60% of the world’s arable land and 50% of its uncultivated arable land, as well as over 60% of the labour force across the continent employed in subsistence farming. Yet, despite this immense potential it imported food worth up to US$115 billion in the last year and the proportion of the population facing hunger surpassed 20%. If a continent with these resources cannot feed itself, or provide economic security for its farmers, we must ask what will it take to change this systemic failure?

As to the size of the prize, according to the African Development Bank, Africa’s food market, currently valued at US$313 billion, could triple to more than $1 trillion annually… but only if governments and business leaders radically rethink their policies and support for agriculture, farmers, and the development of in-market agribusinesses. However, change is not simply about addressing faults and harnessing potential. Africa is also facing a perfect storm of climate shocks, biodiversity loss, high costs of capital, and rising debt distress converging to slow agricultural transformation. We need to build a system today which is also resilient for the future.

The Clean Cooling Network exam question

To this end, the key question we have laid down at the Clean Cooling Network is: "How do we unlock Africa’s agricultural potential to feed itself and the world whilst also economically empowering smallholder farmers and making them climate-resilient … all without using diesel?"

Importantly, in seeking the answer we have recognised that this is not simply about addressing food insecurity and resilience, it is about one health, economic growth, jobs and harnessing the youth market (more than 60% of Africa’s population is under-25). And it is also about inclusion: Women form the majority of Africa’s agricultural workforce, yet they are disproportionately excluded from value addition, training, and access to cold-chain infrastructure. Designing equitable, gender-responsive systems is essential to ensuring cold-chains deliver maximum social benefit.

Creating new value in the farming communities

We must first transform agriculture itself by working with farmers and their communities on skills, technology demonstration, trial and adoption (including telemetrics and e-procurement / trading platforms), and the development of their own investment-grade equitable business models. How can we create resilient value chains if produce cannot be preserved from the point of harvest?

And this is where at ACES we work with farming communities on the opportunities for value addition and food processing that can pull downstream economic gain right back to the rural communities. Currently, the lion’s share of value is added after the farm, through processing, trading, and branding, with farming and farmers typically just seeing around 25% of the total global value across agricultural value chains. In Africa, limited local processing means that only about $40 of value is added per ton of agricultural produce, roughly one-fifth of the value added in high-income economies. The result is a structural imbalance where smallholder farmers remain poor while traders, processors, and retailers further along the chain reap the rewards.

With access to cold-chains, we can enable smallholder farmers to move from simply producing raw outputs for immediate sale after harvest, to sharing in the value of processing, marketing, and revenue from what they produce. In practice, this could double or even triple farmer incomes, while creating new micro-enterprises in rural areas – from drying and freezing units to branded local food products.

Community Cooling Hubs

A cold-chain is an integrated temperature-controlled food distribution system that ensures perishable produce and/or temperature-sensitive products are kept at their optimum temperature and environment to maintain their quality, nutritional value, and safety, from source to destination. In the case of food supply, it involves a broad range of activities and technologies from farm to fork, including, amongst others, the use of precooling, refrigerated warehouses, cold storage at the wholesale/retail level, catering, mobile components, and domestic fridges through to consumption.

All of these components can be integrated into our novel Community Cooling Hub (CCH) facilities. In so doing, they offer a transformative, systems-based solution to meeting the diverse cooling, cold-chain, and wider energy demands of rural communities in a sustainable way - economically, environmentally, and socially - through innovative "shared value" business models.

The “first-of-a-kind” CCH is being constructed in a flagship pilot at the Rubirizi campus of ACES in Kigali, Rwanda. It is intended as a test and demonstration unit to validate the concept in a real community context while also serving research and training purposes. The CCH features a central energy and cooling system, along with a cluster of cooling units tailored to the community’s needs.

This ground-breaking demonstration of a CCH will provide pre-cooling, cold storage and freezing for food produce, and the use of phase change material (PCM) based freezing for transport. It will also incorporate features such as food processing facilities, retail and canteen space, community food lockers (so families can store perishable food securely), room cooling for community buildings, and even electric charging stations for e-mobility (to support refrigerated transport or local e-transport needs). This breadth of services is enabled by a modular design where various temperature zones (chilled, frozen, ambient cooling) are supplied by a common, optimally managed thermal system.

A significant advantage of the CCH model is its multi-energy service approach, which ensures viability by embedding value-added processes, such as food processing, into its operational structure. Through aggregation in design, the energy requirements of these can be met efficiently and sustainably using system-designed energy strategies.

Create new jobs

Local processing also means new jobs and skills in the community. Instead of simply shipping raw produce away and importing finished food products, the community creates the latter on-site, delivering additional employment in packhouses, processing facilities, and logistics operations. These jobs stay in the community instead of moving to a distant city. This approach also cultivates local entrepreneurship: for example, a farmer cooperative might develop its own brand of dried fruit snacks or chili sauces, moving up from being price-takers to product-makers. It returns power to the farmers, allowing them to participate in lucrative stages of the value chain that were previously inaccessible. To support this transition, at ACES we are training farming communities in food safety, food processing, as well as the management and operation of Community Cooling and Food Processing Hubs.

A new technical workforce

Alongside upskilling farmers, we also recognise that we need to build the technical workforce ahead of the technology deployment curve, not after it. The market in Africa for cold-chain is developing, yet refrigeration equipment is still not fully understood or widely used, in part because a base of engineers and technicians with the appropriate skills is desperately needed to support its adoption.

ACES looks to drive the deployment of clean cooling technologies. In parallel, through its various training courses, it builds the technical expertise needed to operate and maintain a sustainable cold-chain. The learning resources available on the Kigali campus, which include state-of-the-art facilities such as the Refrigeration Training Centre and the Demo Hall, offer unmatched “hands-on” experience through practical sessions. In addition to this campus-based learning, we conduct study tours for trainees to gain “in-the-field” exposure and to identify cooling needs in communities. Our trainees help address community challenges in relation to post-harvest handling, cooling and cold-chain, health, quality control, energy efficiency, and the environment. At ACES, programme participants are not only trained to become fully equipped technicians/engineers capable of handling sophisticated technical tasks in the industry, but also developed into forward thinkers able to tackle pressing climate change issues and social challenges. We currently offer more than 25 courses from one day to full Masters, including some online with more being launched every month on CCN platform.

And we are placing Africa’s youth at the centre of this transformation with technical and vocational training and continuous development through classroom, online and hands-on experience, to equip them with essential skills for designing, operating, managing, and maintaining modern value chains.

Design the food corridors

Cold-chains are critical infrastructure, underpinning food, trade, health, and impacting our energy systems. But they are invisible to many and, in the developing economies of the Global South, often fragmented. Farmers know when their crops spoil, traders know when a truck breaks down, vendors know when produce arrives already past its prime. Yet governments and planners rarely see the full picture all at once while regional connectivity remains a key challenge. We must build integrated food corridors that link Africa’s production zones to major national and regional markets, as well as those overseas. But we need to do it with a defined cost and an energy efficient and resilient strategy. Traditional planning tools have not been able to answer fundamental questions:

• Where would scarce public investment in cold-chain infrastructure be best placed?
• How will new infrastructure actually be used across the value chain - from farmers and cooperatives to traders, transporters, markets, and consumers?
• How should cold-chain systems adapt over time, responding to changing priorities and targets, new investments, climate change, shifting markets, and other shocks?

At the CCN we are addressing this gap through the CCN Virtual Modelling Suite. This brings together interconnected tools that help policymakers and development partners to understand the food corridors needed, and design the logistical systems, nodes, and modal choices to access markets and support value chain development.

Three of the suite’s core components are:

• The optimisation model, which identifies the most efficient configuration of cold-chain facilities within given costs and other constraints, helping countries design networks that deliver on their development and climate targets.
• The agent-based model (ABM), which simulates how people and organisations ("actors") actually behave once new infrastructure is introduced, revealing adoption patterns, bottlenecks, and system dynamics.
• The “Fit for future” component, which includes testing the systems against climate and weather forecasts as well as the transition to electrification and recharging and energy network implications.

Each offers a different perspective. Optimisation provides the blueprint; ABM shows how cold-chain systems behave in reality; Fit for Future builds resilience. Together, within the CCN Virtual Modelling Suite,

they provide governments and development agencies with the evidence needed to make better investment decisions as well as understand the workforce requirements.

Evaluating Sustainable Cooling and Cold-chain investments

Despite the urgent need for cold-chains across Africa, there is a reluctance to invest in them in quite the same way as other infrastructure, such as energy or water supply, or indeed the production of food itself. This reluctance is amplified by accounting tools which do not appropriately value the full range of benefits accruing from cold-chain infrastructures or take into account the distribution of risks, hazards, costs and benefits across commodity value chains. At the CCN we have addressed this by building an evaluation model, which through a holistic valuation protocol can enhance the fundability and actual funding of cold-chain investments from all stakeholders in food value chains. It achieves this by calculating the full benefit, including the wider societal wins.

One Health

The cold-chain also serves as the silent backbone of global health: a temperature-controlled supply system essential for transporting and storing vaccines, medicines, diagnostic reagents etc. Its failure, whether due to poor infrastructure, inadequate maintenance, or a lack of trained personnel, can mean the difference between life and death. In Africa, it is estimated that up to 50% of vaccines are wasted due to cold-chain failures, resulting in significant financial losses and missed immunisation opportunities.

Despite its importance, the cold-chain remains one of the least understood and most undervalued components of health systems in Africa. Most public health training programmes offer little or no content on refrigeration, thermal monitoring, or energy resilience. Technicians and logisticians are often expected to "figure it out" on the job, leading to inefficiencies, wastage, and sometimes tragic outcomes.

In response, alongside our focus on cold-chains for food we have launched a Cold-Chain for Global Health training programme. This programme is designed to train African practitioners, engineers, logisticians, and public health leaders in designing, maintaining, managing, and innovating cold-chain systems tailored to African One Health realities.

Technology

Equipment is at the centre of the cold-chain and will become even more so as we plan to transition to renewables and cleaner solutions, including low GWP and natural refrigerants. Sadly, Africa is one of the main areas where cheap and outdated appliances that do not comply with current regulations in developed countries are ‘dumped’ to consumers in the markets of developing countries.

This is where initiatives such as the ACES environmental test chamber come into play. The new facility, which is due to be ready for use later this year (2025), will be a game changer for SSA. In addition to demonstrating new technologies, it will enable Governments, manufacturers, or retailers, to check compliance with minimum energy performance standards (MEPS) or energy labels and to ensure that appliances such as domestic refrigerators, professional units (catering cabinets), or commercial (retail) cabinets, fully comply with import regulations. It will also provide assurance that manufacturer claims are valid and help identify the best performing appliances in the market.

The chamber can also be used in the development and testing of new appliances, especially by local manufacturers in SSA, developing new products that are able to outcompete imported refrigerators. This will aid local manufacturing, skills development in-country and the development of new appliances that are designed specifically for the needs of the African market.

In summary, we have set out to holistically understand and cover all bases from designing food and planning health corridors, future energy strategies, and climate risk mitigations, to pulling value back to farming communities, training engineers and technicians, and understanding overall value. There are gaps, and there is a need for collaborative work to be done, but ACES and the CCN offer a realistic platform for system-level solutions. Join us in Birmingham, UK, on the 28th - 29th October to conceptualise, discuss, and think through strategies and solutions and the ways we can work together to accelerate change and turn the potential of Africa into reality.