Dysmus Kisilu is helping small farmers in sub-Saharan Africa

Brut America

1.3 billion tons. That's how much food is wasted every year.  And it's the challenge this young entrepreneur his trying to tackle in sub-Saharan Africa.

Transcript

00:00In the Western countries, such as Europe and America, it's a lot of food waste, whereby

00:22you have like a big burger and you just eat half of it and you throw the other half.

00:27But in Africa, the problem is food loss.

00:29What this means is when a farmer harvests a tomato, it doesn't even reach the market,

00:35it spoils at their farm, because they don't have access to cooling facilities, to storage,

00:39and these are the challenges that we are trying to tackle.

00:59Say you're like a fresh produce farmer, so this is like a fruit, let's say a mango or

01:17a tomato, and you just harvested it and you don't have a market for it.

01:23So we tell you, like you send an SMS and you ask is there space in the cold storage and

01:29we reply, yes there is space, and we provide a logistic service where you just come with

01:33it and you store.

01:51This ideally helps you reduce the desperation of selling at a cheap price, because you don't

01:57have a market, and then it also helps you preserve your produce for longer.

02:13If food loss was a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases

02:19after the US and China, that's like a very big country.

02:22On top of that, the impact of food loss is not only in climate, you can see it in the

02:27water use, and it's a lot of land that gets wasted, because you have to cut forests to

02:32increase your cultivation, you have to remove the biodiversity to increase the agricultural

02:39yields.

02:40So if you maximise with the land that you have and you increase your productivity, you're

02:46going to have more, which means that you're going to utilise the land much better and

02:51water use much better, and it's better for the climate and better for your stomach also.

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