Lots of fun and some life-changing conversations – ACES Festival of Cooling
The Festival of Cooling taking place in Kigali, Rwanda next week (October 7th – 10th), is much more than a technical gathering. With the Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold-Chain (ACES) operational and activities expanding, it is a public declaration that Rwanda, and indeed Africa, is ready to put sustainable cooling, and more specifically cold-chain, at the heart of its social, economic, environmental and One Health agendas. Cold-chain is critical infrastructure that underpins food security and nutrition, improves health outcomes, and delivers economic well-being. Importantly, it can create new jobs for youth, especially young women, and build resilience to the rapidly changing climate. With the Festival we are celebrating the role cooling plays in our lives, increasing the visibility of cold-chains to the public eye, inspiring Africa’s next generation to be part of the continent’s cooling transformation, and engaging farmers, innovators and entrepreneurs in ACES activities. As well, of course, as having some great fun!
Reducing food losses and adding economic value
The stark reality today is that Sub-Saharan Africa loses more than 37% of its food production between harvest and market, equivalent to 120–170 kilograms per person each year. This unnecessary loss not only, tragically, deprives people of healthy nutrition, but also devastates farmers’ incomes and puts a break on economic growth in rural communities. But how can we improve food supplies and financial well-being if perishable produce cannot be preserved from the point of harvest through to the point of consumption? By integrating pre-cooling, cold storage, and refrigerated transport, we can protect the shelf life, connect farmers to markets, and facilitate exports. For farmers across Rwanda, in districts such as Ngoma, Huye, Musanze, Rubavu, Rusizi, and Nyagatare, access to a cold-chain would mean the ability to store produce for longer, reduce food losses, and realise a better price, days, or even weeks, after harvest. Imagine the transformation in their financial well-being, as well as the local economic growth, that a cold-chain could unlock on the back of increased tomato or milk volumes reaching markets in high quality condition and delivering higher returns.
But, crucially, cold-chains don’t just reduce losses by preserving perishable produce, they enable economic value addition to take place in smallholder farmer communities through the adoption of food processing, packaging, and branding, turning raw produce into market-ready, nutritious products for more people. In doing so, communities capture more of the food system’s value and their cold-chains become an engine of growth, driving higher incomes and investments in rural economies, creating new jobs across farming, logistics, and processing, and building more resilient livelihoods. The Community Cooling Hubs developed by ACES are built around cold-chains to enable groups of farmers to co-operatively aggregate produce, reach local and distant markets, and collaborate with local entrepreneurs and innovators on capturing value from downstream in the system, bringing it back to the local community. Scaled nationally, these hubs can create food corridors that link rural communities to urban centres and export markets, ensuring inclusive participation in Africa’s economic development.
Globally, farmers capture only about 25% of food value chains. In Africa, limited processing means just $40 of value is added per tonne of produce, five times less than in high-income countries. Africa has more than 60% of the world’s uncultivated arable land. Yet, it imported food worth up to US$115 billion in the last year. Cooling changes this. By enabling better post-harvest management to ensure local storage, improved produce quality, and food processing, farmers and cooperatives can create branded products, from juices to dried fruits. In this way, farmers can shift from being price-takers to price-makers, help build competitive agro-industries that earn foreign exchange and strengthen resilience.
Job and entrepreneurship opportunities for young Africans
Cold-chain is a job’s agenda with a broad scope ranging from the technicians installing and maintaining refrigeration equipment, and innovators creating novel in-country-focused technologies, to entrepreneurs building compelling food brands and logistics companies implementing new supply-chain opportunities. With over 60% of Africa’s population aged under 25, this is also a youth agenda. In Rwanda, ACES is creating a world-class education and innovation hub, offering a rapidly expanding suite of provision covering everything from practical “hands-on” training and short courses to Masters level qualifications. Crucially, this is a wide-ranging programme designed to equip the country with the skilled technical workforce and pipeline of entrepreneurs, innovators and market makers needed to underpin every aspect of Africa’s growing cold-chain economy.
At ACES, young innovators are developing clean energy cold storage and transport solutions, mobile cooling businesses including home delivery, apps to create new markets, smart fridges, and milk and fish cold-chain services. Many approach us for training and support to grow these ventures. The Festival of Cooling’s innovation competitions will highlight such start-ups, showing Rwanda is not only adopting global solutions, but also developing home-grown innovations to export across Africa.
And it is not just about innovation in the food sector, Rwanda has built robust vaccine supply chains, a strength that became evident during COVID-19. Yet , 25% of vaccines are wasted due to poor cold-chains globally. Through ACES, Rwanda is demonstrating new ideas like the use of drones, advancing training for logisticians and engineers, and ensuring medicines, blood, and vaccines are preserved effectively. It is also underpinning the "One Health" approach and the role of the cold-chain as the foundation of public health resilience. The ACES model will show how strong systems and local capacity can save lives and build trust.
The Festival of Cooling is designed to catalyse action, connecting innovators with investors, policymakers, and partners. Rwanda can leverage its innovation-friendly policy environment to provide incubation, financing mechanisms, and market access. By aligning competition winners with regional and international investment pipelines, they can move from prototypes to thriving businesses.
Affordable, scalable, and inclusive
Affordability comes from shared, modular solutions. Community Cooling Hubs aggregate demand from farmers, health clinics, and businesses, making local systems viable. But we also work with communities to create the financeable business models grounded in sound data, that are critical to unlock finance. Rwanda can combine concessional climate funds, government incentives, as well as private capital, and must prioritise partnerships that deliver finance, technical and business know-how, and markets. This means collaboration with development banks, universities for R&D, and private-sector players in logistics and retail, and of course, food processing. Inclusivity requires targeting rural communities first, ensuring women and youth are prioritised, but regional cooperation is equally vital to design food and health corridors linking Rwanda with East Africa and beyond.
ACES is at the centre of the Cool Africa conversation
ACES was born in Rwanda but built with a Pan-African vision. At our Rubirizi campus in Kigali, we demonstrate scalable models and new innovations, ranging from virtual environments for nationwide cold-chain infrastructure planning to a local Community Cooling Hub. We provide training to the highest standards. And with the first state-of-the-art cold-chain equipment test centre in sub-Saharan Africa, we can now test appliances in Africa for Africa - thereby stopping the “dumping” of sub-standard appliances shipped to the continent from across the world. We convene governments, investors, and innovators to co-design solutions and strengthen regional food and health corridors. In short, ACES and Rwanda provide leadership and a testbed that can serve as a beacon for others; through raising awareness, stimulating debate, and demonstrating success, the benefits can then be extended to one and all across Africa.
The key to this vital conversation is storytelling. Farmers must see cold-chains as higher incomes; patients as safe vaccines; youth as new jobs; consumers as access to safe, nutritious food. By framing cold-chains as a human enabler of livelihoods, equity and resilience, we shift it from the technical to the transformative. That is what this festival seeks to do: make the invisible visible. If a farmer gets an interest in trying out the cold-chain, a student gets inspired to take on a future career in cooling, a start-up that was at the verge of giving up on the cold-chain business path decides to give it another try, and a visual storytelling photographer stimulates a cool conversation, this fun-filled festival will have achieved its aim.
For those of you who cannot make the Festival, many of these themes will be explored at our Conference – A Cool World: Sustainable cooling and cold-chain for the global South, University of Birmingham 28-29th October. Delegates from Africa and India will be joining.