Agriculture plays a vital role in the Nigerian economy, with the rural population being particularly dependent on the primary sector for their livelihood. 70 percent of Nigeria’s rural population are farmers, of which 88 percent are smallholders with less than 2 hectares of land.
Yet, Nigeria’s agricultural sector faces significant risks due to a lack of access to cooling to protect the food. 40 percent of Nigeria’s produce is lost or wasted, equivalent to 77 million tons and USD 40 billion worth of produce wasted annually.
Besides the negative impact on farmers’ income caused by this food loss, they further face income loss by being forced to sell their produce at low prices at the wrong time due to lack of access to market information.
Climate-friendly cooling technologies are available, but their deployment has been limited by lack of reliable access to energy, high-upfront costs, unavailability of proper maintenance, and limited financing options and know-how.
In addition, most of the existing postharvest expertise solutions and market intelligence are closed-access and not inclusive of smallholder farmers in developing countries.
As an expansion effort of the work being done as a part of the data.org’s Inclusive Growth and Recovery Challenge in India, BASE and Empa are developing open access, data-science-based mobile application Your Virtual Cold-Chain Assistant (YourVCCA) for Nigeria. YourVCCA seeks to enable smallholders to optimise their production and farm management decisions and gain access to sustainable cooling.
The app digitises the processes required for clean technology providers to offer the servitisation business model to their customers. With this model, farmers gain access to the most efficient, reliable and sustainable off-grid cooling while only paying for the amount of food they store with the servitisation business model (pay per kg-day), avoiding any upfront investment. Service providers own and maintain the cooling facilities, thereby covering the operational costs. This long-term commitment serves as an incentive for them to install the most energy-efficient equipment and perform high-quality maintenance.
The application will complement this by allowing farmers to monitor their crops’ quality in real-time and provide access to tailored market intelligence to maximise their net profit while leveraging the extended shelf life enabled by cooling. The app offers recommendations on the best time to sell the crop, based on expected shelf life and projected market prices.
The expansion of the project YourVCCA to Nigeria is commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). It is being carried out by BASE in partnership with Empa on behalf of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH. Parallel funding is received from the data.org Inclusive Growth and Recovery Challenge, which, launched in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, aims to tackle society’s most significant challenges and help people and communities thrive by harnessing the power of data science.
To develop the app, the project team is using various data inputs on weather, market volume and location, satellite images, fresh-produce yields, hygrothermal cold-storage sensors, forecasted remaining shelf life of produce, and real-time market prices.
The app complements machine learning models with physics-based food quality modelling and will include the following components:
