Acumen invests in Kenya's Keep IT Cool
Acumen has made an investment in Keep IT Cool, a cold chain-powered smart distribution platform in Kenya.
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Acumen has made an investment in Keep IT Cool, a cold chain-powered smart distribution platform in Kenya.
Food waste is a trillion-dollar global problem. Nearly a third of all food on Earth goes to waste. In East Africa, that percentage is often higher. Fisherfolk on Lake Victoria in Kenya, for instance, lose 50% of their catch every day due to poor storage, handling, and cold-chain logistics.
When Francis Nderitu, Keep IT Cool’s co-founder and managing director, and his co-founder, Abigail Gachigi, first approached the fisherfolk who work on Lake Victoria, they expected them to have a preservation problem. What they learned was that they had a market access problem. Even if they could keep their fish cold, they struggled to consistently connect with buyers, which limited their ability to run a business.
So, rather than sell them refrigerators, Keep IT Cool built them a market enabled by a range of cooling solutions and a B2B app that connects them directly with customers. The app is called Markiti and allows a network of shops, outlets, and restaurants to order fish and chicken straight from the source so that farmers and fisherfolk can gauge demand in real time.
Fisherfolk are organised into beach management units (BMUs) that sit on landing sites and ensure organisation of collection and sale of fish. Keep IT Cool provides these BMUs with solar-powered cold storage units and offers refrigerated trucks to transport fish to a network of in-house cold chain aggregation centres. It then delivers fish and chicken to retailers using its fleet of refrigerated and chilled trucks. It provides solar-powered cold storage units to retailers as well.
“In East Africa, post-harvest losses due to lack of adequate cold storage present a critical barrier to food security and economic growth,” says Chris Maranga, who leads Acumen’s work in East Africa. “Keep IT Cool’s solar-powered cold storage technology not only addresses this issue but does so sustainably, empowering fisherfolks and smallholder poultry farmers in some of Kenya’s most marginalized communities. This alignment with our goal to build long-term resilience in local markets made this an easy choice for us.”
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