New Faces at ACES: Odile Mukeshimana, Diane Benimana and Juvenal Djangwani

ACES has seen further expansion over the past six months, with 13 new staff members joining since August 2025. New arrivals have taken up positions across the organisation, including in the academic, research, and technical departments.

This comes as the organisation ramps up its operations, expanding the range of courses on offer, engaging with more communities, and working to establish further SPOKEs across Africa.

ACES director Toby Peters said: "As ACES moves to delivery at scale, people are our most important foundation. The strength of our institution lies not only in technology and facilities but also in the expertise, commitments and values of the individuals who join us."

"Like all our team, Odile, Diane, and Juvenal each represent a critical dimension of what sustainable cooling requires: community engagement, new knowledge built on rigorous evidence and continuous evaluation, and practical teaching that connects science to real-world needs. Their work will help ensure that our solutions are not only technically sound but also socially grounded and genuinely transformative."

“I want everyone to love agriculture”

Odile Mukeshimana joined ACES in November 2025 as a field coordinator, largely working on community and stakeholder engagement. Before joining ACES, she was the department head for rural and urban development at the Institut Catholique de Kabgayi, as well as an assistant lecturer in post-harvest management and food processing.

When she first heard about ACES, Odile said: “I was interested in their systematic approach of integrating the environment, One Health and post-harvest management.” Her new role as a field coordinator sees her working closely with farmers from the Katungo Cooperative in eastern Rwanda, which is receiving advice and support from ACES. She added: “My focus is on stakeholder engagement, value addition, post-harvest management, and sharing good agricultural practices.”

Growing up in Muhanga, Odile said she saw many farming communities just like the Katungo Cooperative. “They have a cold room, but they don’t know how it works, or it requires too much energy,” she said. “With the involvement of ACES, we can make those cold rooms operational – but we have to engage farmers and centre our solutions on them. They need to feel ownership.”

Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI) is a big focus for Odile: “From the farm to the Board of the cooperative, there should be both women and men,” she explained. “It’s not about only employing women; it’s about inclusivity, so that no one is left behind. So, I engage with [woman farmers], I become friendly with them, and I tell them how important it is that their voice is heard.”

Alongside her work, Odile is an “agriculture influencer”, selected by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) to help “influence” a digital audience to “understand the importance of agriculture”. She said she hopes to show that professionals and young people “can be proud of being farmers.”

“I want everyone to love agriculture, and have a little garden at home,” she said. Her own garden features legumes, celery, carrots, onions and avocado trees. She added: “Everyone should thank a farmer – after all, we need them three times a day.”

“You can see ACES’ impact through the data”

Diane Benimana, a data specialist focusing on monitoring and evaluation, joined the research team at ACES in October 2025. A statistician by training, Diane is “very passionate” about playing with data: “I love collecting information when it is still raw, and turning that raw data into actionable insights,” she said. “That’s my passion. I’m doing what I love.”

After completing her master’s at the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Diane worked at the Rwandan National Institute of Statistics for four and a half years before transitioning into the NGO sector, helping CARE International to implement a USAID project on water sanitation and hygiene.

After two years, she took a position at a different NGO, Cultivating New Frontiers in Agriculture. “We were working with smallholder farmers, training them in good agricultural practices so they could increase their productivity,” Diane said. “We also linked them with financial institutions so they could get loans which were easier for them to afford.”

The project was supposed to run for five years, but cuts to USAID funding in 2025 meant the organisation “closed completely”, forcing Diane to search for a new job. “I had some offers, but they were not what I really wanted,” she recalled. “I knew my passions and what I wanted in life.”

When a colleague from Diane’s master’s programme shared an ACES job advert with her, she was intrigued. “To be honest, I was not even aware that there was an institution working on refrigeration in Rwanda,” she said. She joined ACES one week before the Festival of Cooling, which she described as an eye-opening experience. She recalled: “I said to myself, I think I will learn a lot working here.”

Since joining ACES, Diane has been developing the monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) framework which will be used to assess how much of an impact ACES is making. The research team is currently working on a “baseline survey” which will measure a farming community’s crop yields, post-harvest losses, seasonal earnings, and access to cooling technologies.

“My responsibility is to show where we started and where we are heading, as well as the impact we are making at the community level, the national level, and the East African level,” Diane explained. “Through the data we are collecting and analysing, we can see the impact being made in a certain time period.”

Diane added: “I always advocate for dealing with the data, because it doesn’t lie. You can see it through the data: ACES is making a difference.”

“I saw ACES as a particularly special institute for me”

Before joining ACES as a post-harvest management lecturer in November 2025, Juvenal Djangwani spent 15 years teaching food science and technology at the University of Rwanda. Alongside his career as an academic, he also worked as a consultant, helping to implement food safety systems, develop curricula, and audit agricultural value chains.

“People still don’t really understand the difference between cooling and the cold-chain,” Juvenal said. “We all think of refrigerators at the supermarket or in our homes, but we don’t focus on how, if we are talking about fruits and vegetables, the cold-chain should start right from the field.”

While auditing the fruits and vegetables value chain for the National Institute of Research, Juvenal said: “We realised that only 5% of the companies that we audited were using refrigerated trucks, and about 9% of fruit and vegetable processing firms had a cold room.”

Thanks to its relationship with the University of Rwanda, Juvenal was aware of ACES from its inception. “When it started, most of us didn’t really care that much about it,” he said. “But I kept visiting the campus, and I realised that ACES was actually growing. I could see that they were transforming buildings here and bringing in equipment. I started following them on social media, and they were putting out so many interesting articles.”

When ACES put out calls for a post-harvest management lecturer in August 2025, Juvenal felt that he had to apply. “I saw ACES as a particularly special institute for me,” he explained. His interest was captured by the Try Before You Buy scheme, currently being trialled in Kenya. “For many of these intervention projects, we train farmers, but we don’t follow up to ensure that what we have trained them about is actually being implemented,” he said. “So, I found [Try Before You Buy] to be a perfect complement to the training.”

After starting at ACES, Juvenal “immediately” became involved in the ongoing plans to launch a master’s course in clean cooling. He was also tasked with reviewing the online course on Essentials in Cold-Chain Systems, and suggesting ways to make it more interactive. “I was especially impressed by how the team is constantly looking at how to improve the course,” he said.

“I was also asked to participate in training for farmers, which is always very interesting because you learn a lot from them,” he said. “For example, the way they interpret in their own way the right time for harvest: we were showing them objective methods like using a refractometer to measure the sugar content, but you realise that from their experience, they know the exact right time to harvest a mango based on the shape, the colour, and the size.”

Juvenal said it is important to assure farmers that scientific methods can support their instincts, rather than replace them. “They were all saying that they want tomatoes to be completely red [before harvesting], because that’s when they make a nice sauce,” he said. “You want that if you use it immediately or sell it to your neighbour, but if you want to send it to a market where it will spend two or three days, you have to pick it when it is green. Sometimes, they reflect and say, ‘Oh, that’s why, when we send tomatoes [to market], half of them are returned to us spoiled.'"

According to Juvenal, “temperature really defines everything” for perishable produce. “I think ACES itself is making me realise that we really have to focus on convincing people about the full cold-chain,” he added. “Not only farmers, but also policymakers: most of the investment goes on ensuring that farmers get the highest yields pre-harvest, but little investment goes into ensuring that what we have harvested actually reaches the market. I think ACES is really going to help people understand the importance of cold-chain.”