Date: Tuesday 19th October
Time: 13:00 – 15:50 CAT/CET | 12:00 – 14:50 BST | 7:00-9:50 EDT
Registration Link:
https://bham-ac-uk.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN__hZRb1jmRo6RMjWzxKWteQ
Underpinned with GBP £ multi-million investments by the Governments of UK and Rwanda, the Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold-chain (ACES) is scheduled to be operationalised in 2022 with its own Rubirizi campus in Kigali, Rwanda, hosted by the University of Rwanda (UR).
The mission of ACES is to provide the applied cross-sector research and dissemination, learning and teaching, and industrial collaboration to advance the widespread adoption of energy-efficient and climate-friendly cold-chain solutions in agriculture and health sectors. ACES will economically empower farmers, increase export revenues, enhance job creation in rural areas, mitigate climate and environment impacts, and foster low-carbon development. ACES-developed cold chain solutions will be showcased at Living Laboratories in rural communities. These sites will feature tailored technologies and business models tested for scalability in other communities throughout Africa.
The ACES Summit is organised by the British High Commission and Rwanda’s Ministry of Environment with support from UNEP’s United for Efficiency (U4E), the Centre of Sustainable Cooling, the University of Rwanda (UR), and a consortium of UK universities. The virtual event aims to provide stakeholders, including policy makers, private sector and other national and international counterparts of the ACES concept and latest development developments at the Headquarters and affiliated Living Laboratories, with a focus on opportunities to scale-up sustainable cold chains solutions through this platform.
Food saved is as important as food produced. Up to 40% of food is lost between farms and markets in sub-Saharan Africa, with two-thirds of this in the first mile. 80% of African farms are smaller than two hectares and they produce 70% of the continent’s total food. Lack of effective cold-chain is estimated to directly result in losses of 475 million tonnes or 13% of total food production globally, which is worth $350 billion and enough to feed approximately 950 million people. Beyond the agricultural sector, COVID-19 and other vaccines requiring similar conditions place immense pressure on the cold -chain.
