Photo by Mireille Isimbi/CCN: Winning submissions will take home a cash prize
Gideon Mulungi
Refrigeration and cold-chains researcher
Happening in Kigali from 6th – 10th October 2025, the Festival of Cooling is more than just an event to attend. It’s a platform on which to get creative, shout about ideas, compete, and inspire action for change. Two official pre-festival competitions will give visual storytellers and innovators a chance to put their perspectives and products in front of an audience that matters: the “Photography Competition” and the “Startup Pitch Competition”.
Photography - Making the Invisible, Visible
The photography competition is open to everyone, and your chance to tell a powerful story without saying a word. Whether you’re a professional behind the lens or snapping with your phone, we want you to capture cooling, or the absence of it, in a way that makes people stop and think.
Picture the vibrance of food fresh from a cold store in a bustling market, fish chilling on ice in a rural village, clever ways to keep things cool at home, vaccines on the move, or cooling systems working in our hospitals and community health centres to maintain medicines at the right temperature. Picture your idea of what cooling and the cold-chain is. Show us what happens when cooling works and when it doesn’t. Share images of food rotting in the open or medicines being dumped because of a lack of cooling. Go bold. Go unexpected. And surprise us!
Photos selected by the competition judges will be showcased during the festival, sparking new conversations about cooling’s role in everyday life. Prizes for winning submissions will be announced when the competition opens.
Startup Pitch - Showcasing Innovation
If you’ve built something that you think could transform the cold-chain, this is your moment to shine. The startup pitch competition will put you in front of investors, partners, policymakers, and industry leaders ready to hear your story.
We’re looking for young companies, five years old or less, registered or intending to register in Rwanda. You must have a working prototype, minimum viable product, or operational model. No theory-only ideas; we want solutions that work, from cold storage technology, solar-powered or off-grid cooling, and novel recovery of refrigerants, to temperature-controlled logistics, IoT enabled cold chains, and much more. Your innovation could be in agriculture, technology (including software and hardware), health, logistics, or e-commerce. If it makes cooling smarter, cleaner, or more accessible, it belongs here.
A portfolio of unique support for the winners will be announced when the competition opens.
Got a product or solution you are already implementing, but have not yet registered a company? You are still welcome to participate in the challenge. If you are among the winners, we will guide you through the process of registering a company. Interested in taking part in the competition?
The Festival of Cooling is your launchpad
These competitions are about more than prizes. They’re about sharing stories that need to be heard, pushing ideas that could change lives, and showing that cooling connects to every part of how we live, eat, and stay healthy. If you have a story to tell, bring it through your lens. If you have a solution to share, pitch it. The Festival of Cooling is your launchpad. Step up and make it count.
Of course, there will be rules for both competitions, and a process to apply to participate, and we will be announcing these alongside the competition launches and prizes in the first week of September.