Cool Crops, Hot Profits

Female farmers are responsible for 60 to 80 percent of food production in developing countries and contribute to 50 percent of the world’s food production, predominantly through small-scale farming. Yet their access to productive assets, finance, farm technologies, and training remains staggeringly low. For years, these gender gaps have compounded to cause lower agricultural productivity and profit rates among female farmers. A familiar story follows: female farmers find themselves trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty and dependence, with minimal or no say in household and on-farm decision-making. 

As temperatures get warmer, speeding up the quality loss in crops, farmers are forced to distress sell or discard their crops — a problem that is more severe in the case of women. Increasing access to sustainable cooling can help integrate women into the agricultural value chain, making their farming more productive and commercially viable while enhancing their adaptive capacities to climate change. 

Recognizing the urgent need to increase access to decentralized cooling to protect smallholder livelihoods, the Basel Agency for Sustainable Energy (BASE) and Empa launched ‘Your Virtual Cold Chain Assistant’ (Your VCCA) in 2021. The project, currently operational in India, Nigeria, and the Philippines, stands on three pillars: servitization, digitalization, and capacity-building. Your VCCA partners with local technology providers running solar-powered cold rooms on a Cooling as a Service (CaaS) business model, where farmers only pay per crate stored per day. The technology providers own, maintain, and operate the rooms, helping farmers avoid upfront investments. Technology providers and cold room operators are trained to use Your VCCA’s Coldtivate app, which digitalizes inventory management to streamline operations. To build farmers’ trust in postharvest cooling, this free-to-use app includes digital food twins that use real-time temperature sensor data to estimate the remaining storage life of each stored crate. This information, combined with market price predictions also available in Coldtivate, allows farmers to take advantage of upward price fluctuations while preserving the quality of the crops. 

Gender mainstreaming has been at the forefront of the work undertaken by one of Your VCCA’s project partners in India, Koel Fresh (KF). In 2021, KF inaugurated a 5-metric-tonne cold room in collaboration with the Rourkela Municipal Corporation and Bloomberg Philanthropies close to the bustling VSS Market in Rourkela, Odisha. In addition to building the cold room in a central public space, easy and safe for women to visit, KF onboarded members of the Maa Tarini Women’s Self-Help Group (SHG) to increase the room’s cultural accessibility. Engaging the SHG served the twofold purpose of developing the skills of women from the local community in managing the operations and finances of the cold room using digital tools and ensuring that gender and power relations do not deter female farmers from using the rooms.   

 

 

The baseline survey conducted across Odisha comprised 303 farmers, 172 men and 131 women. When surveyed about the main commodities produced and the quantities sold, female farmers reported selling 50.8 percent of their produce at market price, which rose to nearly 60 percent for male farmers. Only 1.5 to 3 percent of the harvest was self-consumed, implying that women incurred higher crop losses (17.4 percent and 14.7 percent of the produce for women and men, respectively) and faced the problem of distress selling more often. To remedy these gaps, the SHG has been helping cold room users with aggregating their crops and selling them to wholesale buyers (retail stores, hostels, hotels) at fair rates. 

Digital tools like Coldtivate hold great potential to improve market connectivity and profitability for female farmers, but low phone accessibility could be a hindrance. The baseline survey confirmed that male farmers are more likely to own any phone than women (96 percent vs 75 percent), with the gender gap in smartphone ownership being quite substantial (60 percent vs 31 percent). For the solution to be inclusive for non-smartphone users, an SMS-based notification service was integrated into Coldtivate to keep farmers updated about the remaining storage life of their crops, and cold room operators were trained to inform farmers with no phones in person.  

The roll-out of Your VCCA is accompanied by gender-sensitive awareness-raising campaigns for farmers on the benefits of cooling. Literacy rates among farming households still remain relatively low, particularly among women. Only 37 percent of the surveyed women had some education, with 8 percent of women having secondary or graduate education vis-a-vis 34 percent of men. Thus, all awareness-raising and training material uses pictorial messaging, local languages, and peer-to-peer learning to make it simple to understand.  

Cumulatively, these efforts have helped farmers reduce postharvest losses and increase their incomes. Preliminary data collected on frequent cold room users (34 women and 14 men) suggests that crop spoilage has been reduced from 17 to 4 percent. The reported income for farmers has increased by 29.6 percent as cold rooms offer users an alternative to distress selling. Interestingly, female users report an income increase of 34.3 percent compared to 18.8 percent reported by male users, but more nuanced data is needed to understand how this result is influenced by crop types and selling patterns. 

The recently launched Your Virtual Cold Operators Manual serves as a valuable resource for cold room operators, offering practical guidance on the management of solar-powered cold rooms accommodating multiple crops in the fresh produce value chain. This manual sheds light on the opportunities for decentralized cold rooms, CaaS business models, introduces Your VCCA and guides operators on the usage of the app Coldtivate. 

As more cold rooms integrate Coldtivate into their operations, data can be collected directly in the app via built-in surveys and used to calculate gender-disaggregated statistics on the evolution of postharvest loss and income. Going forward, BASE and Empa plan to combine this information with farmers’ utilisation and payment patterns in an exportable impact dashboard, to help farmers access microcredits and other financial services. With the project’s roll-out to other countries, the impact metrics tracked in Coldtivate will present a more holistic picture of the improvements and gaps in the gender-cooling-poverty nexus.