Keeling Curve

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Impact on Underrepresented Groups:

YourVCCA collaborates with local cooling companies, who own and operate the cold rooms, to employ and train women and youth as cold room operators, enhancing their technical skills. Then, operators lead awareness sessions among their peers, leveraging their community ties. In our pilot sites in Odisha, India, women's self-help groups exclusively manage cold rooms. Apart from overseeing check-ins, check-outs, and shelf-life assessments for all crates, they also play a crucial role in aggregating crops within the cold room and connecting cooling users to bulk buyers. Facilitated by the assurance of freshness through the shelf-life model, this market connection not only lowers transportation expenses for farmers and traders but also eases sales for cooling users with reduced mobility. Training occurs in public spaces frequented by women, with small group-based walkthroughs on app usage. The app, designed with imagery and color coding and available in local languages, ensures accessibility for farmers without formal education. YourVCCA has crafted training materials featuring women as operators and users to shatter gender stereotypes that often exclude women from the commercialization of crops despite their crucial involvement in the production process. A free 2-way SMS system provides shelf life updates for farmers without smartphones.

Website:

https://yourvcca.org/

Mission Statement:

'Your Virtual Cold Chain Assistant' aims to minimize food loss along the horticultural value chain, improving farmers livelihood and increasing food security in the Global South. YourVCCA also reduces GHG emissions from our food systems, totaling 4.4 gigatonnes/year, and enhances the agricultural sector's resilience to a warming planet.

Link: Twitter:

https://twitter.com/Energy_BASE

Link: LinkedIn:

https://ch.linkedin.com/company/stiftung-base