Green Technologies to Facilitate Development of Value Chains
for Perishable Crops and Animal Products

Tomatoes grown by women in greenhouses being stored in Modern Farming Technologies' cold room in Mzuzu

8. Malawi: Walk-in Cooler for Women Farmers

8.1. History and Results

NGO Winrock International in November of 2019 produced a Market Needs, KAP and Technology Assessment report for Malawi, where GreenTech’s goal was to specify and commercialize a solar cold room for use by smallholder vegetable farmers. Like the two other reports compiled by Winrock, the information provided a useful overview, but was too general to be actionable. The research was again conducted before a partner was engaged and a specific focus established. Consequently, activity in Malawi went dormant after the study until SunDanzer could turn attention to the country.

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In April of 2021, the GreenTech Project Manager was introduced to NGO Malawi Fruits. Malawi Fruits had been supporting small-scale farmers in Northern Malawi for 10 years and in 2017 established a trading subsidiary, Modern Farming Technologies (MFT), to increase their impact and reach many more farmers, including offering rent-to-own greenhouses to enable year-round farming. These greenhouses are exclusively owned by women, allowing them to fully participate in the Agri-economy even when they did not have access to farmland.  In 2020, MFT established the first solar powered chill store in Northern Malawi. The chill store, situated in Mzuzu, acts as an aggregation point for fruit and vegetables, extends shelf life by up to 14 days, and acts as a wholesale market to a variety of buyers in the city.

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Malawi Fruits needed another cold room to store tomatoes and other vegetables at its Rumphi location, its Northern most Malawi facility. The cold room would enable it to keep and sell produce locally as well as preserve quality until a truck arrived to take the produce to market, significantly reducing post-harvest losses. While the facility would be connected to the grid, power is both intermittent and relatively expensive. Therefore, a solar powered cooler with battery storage was the most reliable and economical solution with the grid serving as back-up. Rather than implementing a containerized solution, Malawi Fruits, since it owned the land, wanted to build a building to house the walk-in cooler as well as provide covered space for sorting, weighing, selling as well as housing the electronics and batteries. A site-built approach also had the added advantage of being able to implement thicker insulation for the walls, enabling a reduction in the amount of battery storage required and thus lowering cost. These and other experiences implementing solar powered cold rooms were compiled in the report: Lessons Learned Implementing Solar Powered Cold Rooms for Smallholder Agriculture in Zimbabwe and Malawi.

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In May, SunDanzer entered into an agreement with Malawi Fruits to help design and majority fund the construction of the building, cool-room, and Solar+Storage system. In June, a scheduled in-country visit was cancelled when Malawi closed its borders because of a COVID outbreak. Shortly after the agreement, a commercially available, “flat pack” cold room was purchased from Cool Africa in Pretoria, South Africa and Lilongwe-based Team Planet hired to design and install the system to power it. By year end, the cold room and solar+storage system was installed in the newly completed brick building.

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7.2. Current Status

When the GreenTech Project Manager visited Malawi Fruits in November of 2022 the cold store was operational, but not in use due to the greenhouses in the area just beginning production with harvest months away. In the first quarter of 2023 the facility started to store harvested tomatoes until they could be transported to Mzuzu for sale. As production increases in 2023, the plan is to begin to sell tomatoes from the Rumphi packhouse to the local market. Interestingly, there has been no interest from local farmers to pay for cool-as-you-go services and utilize the extra capacity of this and other cold rooms operated by MFT. The reason given is that farmers do not see the value in cooling and preserving their crops; they are heavily conditioned in the traditional mindset of liquidating their crops as quickly as possible and absorbing any post-harvest losses and lower prices.

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In May 2023, a Case Study will be produced by Malawi Fruits on the utility and performance of the Rumphi pack house/cold room. Included in the study will technical and non-technical comparisons to containerized cold rooms the organization operates in Mzuzu and Chintheche.