Teams from BASE and Empa visited Nigeria between 25 October to 4 November to launch the Your Virtual Cold Chain Assistant (Your VCCA) project and meet local stakeholders to grasp the ground realities that will shape the future of the project.

Food insecurity remains a pressing development challenge in Nigeria. With the agricultural sector forming the backbone of the Nigerian economy, the loss of nearly 40 percent of the country’s national food production annually has far-reaching implications for farmer livelihoods and feeding its growing population inclusively. In addition to being a humanitarian concern, food loss poses an environmental threat, contributing to resource wastage and nearly 5 percent of Nigeria’s yearly greenhouse gas emissions. Your VCCA is a data-science-driven mobile application that addresses the technology and infrastructure gaps that lead to post-harvest handling and storage losses. Firstly, it increases access to cooling facilities by enabling and digitalising a pay-per-use model. Secondly, it allows farmers to monitor the shelf-life of the produce in real time and provides them with upcycled market information, which coupled together, helps them make informed business decisions. 

The project is the expansion of BASE and Empa’s efforts in India, which started in January. The project expansion to Nigeria will be marked by piloting the software in various regions across the country, together with several local clean technology providers, starting with ColdHubs Limited.

The project team, composed of Roberta Evangelista and Thomas Motmans from BASE and Kanaha Shoji and Daniel Onwude from Empa, describes the trip as being exceptionally insightful and dense, filled with learnings that are already being integrated into the design of the solution. From Lagos to Owerri and then to Abuja and Jos, each day of the visit unraveled new information, ideas, feedback through site visits, workshops, and conferences. To gather diverse perspectives on the Your VCCA solution, the team interacted with clean cooling technology providers and cold room operators, investors, government associations related to cold chain, nutrition, agriculture and digitalisation, academics, data science entities, farmers, and market traders. The relevance of the project was affirmed by these various stakeholders, who echoed that the solution would solve critical pain points prevalent in the Nigerian fresh food supply chain.

Kicking off the partnership with ColdHubs

The project team kicked off key partnerships in Nigeria, beginning with reconnecting with ColdHubs, a clean cooling technology company. They have previously worked with BASE on their Cooling as a Service initiative and are leading the way, globally, in the provision of decentralised, solar-based cold storage offered under a pay-per-crate model. Together with Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu, the CEO of ColdHubs, the team met with the core team to delve into the strategic and technical details of the project. According to Nneameka, “It is a fantastic project. It will be a game-changer.” Chinedu Hardy Nwadike, who will be managing the project from ColdHubs’ side, confirmed, “Your VCCA handles everything we have headaches with.” The discussions on the day-to-day operations of the company and on the cold chain bottlenecks in Nigeria helped the team garner valuable inputs, which have proved crucial for the team to tailor the project design and implementation to the local conditions.

Site visits for customer-centric design

The project team also visited several sites where ColdHubs rooms are located, including the Mile 12 market in Lagos – one of the largest in the country – and other market-gate cold rooms in Owerri, Abuja and Jos. The detailed questions asked to the smallholder farmers and traders revealed the day-to-day challenges they encountered in terms of accessing storage facilities and coping with market uncertainty. With their needs in mind, the team spoke to room operators to gain an overarching view of the cold chain landscape, identifying ways that Your VCCA can bridge the gap between those in need and those that can provide, all while making the services affordable and more energy efficient. Equipped with the first prototype of the mobile application, the team was able to share it with the cold room operators and receive feedback on the user interface. Overall, the operators agreed that the app was simple to use and would make inventory management a lot easier. The functionalities that were primarily tested pertained to the digitalisation of the cold room inventory: the mobile application enables seamless digitalised check-in, check-out, and tracking of the produce in the rooms, serving as an effective alternative to the hand-written register books in use today.

The project team proceeded to identify and visit other clean cooling providers in the Plateau state in Jos, one of the largest agricultural hubs in Nigeria. Nuanced differences exist in ways different cold chains operate, which is important to acknowledge when designing the software solution. Your VCCA hopes to become a tool that can be leveraged by local entrepreneurs tackling cold chain challenges to standardise operational methodologies. BASE and Empa will further bolster this process by setting up an incubator in the near future to offer technical assistance to these companies regarding how they can incorporate the Cooling as a Service business model in their operations.

Forging key partnerships 

Beyond the on-the-ground insights gained from the site visits, the trip enabled the team to cement key partnerships. This includes building ties with Data Science Nigeria, which holds immense potential to support the project with data collection and validation. Their oversight will complement data gathering efforts in collaboration with other entities met with during the visit, such as the National Bureau of Statistics, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, and other local organisations like Corporate Farmers International.

The team engaged with Infracredit, which is setting up an innovation unit to work on financing Cooling as a Service projects. BASE and Infracredit will work together to design a financial structure that will help companies like ColdHubs tap into commercial debt. This endeavour will include a payment guarantee as well as project finance structures to enable bundling of projects, with the purpose to facilitate the shift from asset-based financing to cash flow-based financing. Such an intervention can be of benefit to clean cooling providers since cold rooms are typically not accepted as collateral, requiring financed companies to own land to access mainstream capital. These hurdles slow down their growth and reduce the scale of their impact. The open-source multi-layered map of Nigeria that the BASE and Empa teams are developing within the project is of particular interest to Infracredit because the data it captures and displays can aid them to better locate and estimate cold room opportunities. In addition, with the use of the digital inventory, Your VCCA can help to better predict cash flows of the clean cooling companies.

West Africa Cold Chain Summit

The project team was invited to the 2-day West Africa Cold Chain Summit to present the project and as well as to participate in a Q&A panel to collect feedback from organisations relevant to the in Nigeria and West Africa’s cold chain industry. The discussion with the audience during the panel discussion and the many connections created during these days were one of the most effective ways to gather opinions from the most prominent experts in the field.

Next Steps

Data collection in Nigeria has commenced. Progress on the Your VCCA app is underway, integrating the new understanding of the users’ needs, alongside the development of the data-science-based and mechanistic models required to generate intelligence and recommendations for farmers that use the software. The pilot sites are being selected and set up, and a work plan is being set up with the key partners engaged in the project.

The expansion of the project Your Virtual Cold Chain Assistant in Nigeria is commissioned by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and is being carried out by BASE in partnership with Empa on behalf of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH. The project is the expansion of BASE and Empa’s efforts in India, which started in January, as part of the DataDotOrg Inclusive Growth and Recovery Challenge, piloted in partnership with The Rockefeller Foundation and the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth. 

For more information about the project, you can explore the project page on the BASE website or the project fact sheet.