Preventing Postharvest Loss Through Solar-Powered Cold Storage Innovation
Research Team: Moses Mosonsieyiri Kansanga, PhD MPhil; Robert Orttung, PhD MA; and David Rain, PhD
Nature-inspired solutions for food loss prevention: exploring smallholder farmers' willingness to adopt solar-powered cold storage, published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 04 March 2025
Description:
Global distribution of perishable items (e.g., food, pharmaceuticals and certain chemicals) relies on temperature-controlled infrastructure to maintain quality and safety and reduce waste. Essentially, a "cold chain" manages the temperature of sensitive products from source to consumption. Many believe that expanding global cold chains is a critical strategy to reduce poverty, increase nutrition and health security, and advance climate action.
Around the world, 526 million tons of food production (12 percent of the total) are lost due to lack of cold chains—enough to feed more than 1 billion people. Food insecurity affects about 24 percent of the population of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) (FAO; IFAD; UNICEF; WFP; and WHO, 2023) and evidence suggests that 40 percent of the annual yield in Sub-Saharan Africa is lost postharvest, with an estimated value of about $1.6 billion (FAO, 2010; Lipinski et al., 2013). The rate of food loss is much higher for vegetables—farmers lose more than 50% of the annual harvest, with women bearing a disproportionate brunt of these impacts.
To help combat the rate of food loss in Sub-Saharan Africa, the project team is piloting and evaluating a cold chain innovation—solar-powered refrigeration for preserving vegetables in off-grid environments. The goal of this innovation is to increase economic support for farmers and local communities by reducing food loss and increasing consumers’ access to fresh vegetables in a sustainable and cost-effective manner. The model is being piloted in Ghana in collaboration with the Simon Diedong Dombo University of Business and Integrated Development Studies (SBB-UBIDS).