Every harvest begins with promise. Yet across Rwanda, much fresh produce never reaches consumers or reaches consumers when quality and nutritional contents have significantly decreased.

Before fruits and vegetables arrive at markets or family kitchens, significant quantities are damaged, wilted or discarded, not because farmers failed to produce them, but because the systems needed to preserve food after harvest remain inadequate.

ALSO READ: Cutting post-harvest losses key to Rwanda’s food security drive

Across Rwanda and much of Africa, cold-chain infrastructure remains fragmented. For smallholder farmers, the result is familiar: nutritious and marketable produce spoils within days of being harvested, value loss follow, produces that should have sold to significant amount of money, are sold to fractions of which they should have been sold at, reducing incomes and contributing to food insecurity.

This pictorial, traces that fragile journey from farm to market. One image shows a vendor balancing a basket of tomatoes, carrots, citrus fruits and green mangoes through a crowded market. Another captures freshly harvested cabbages exposed to direct sunlight along a roadside. Elsewhere, carrots that were firm and vibrant at harvest appear shrivelled just three days later.

At Karembo Cooperative (Ngoma District), farmers pour red and yellow peppers onto a growing discard pile after failing to secure buyers or access cooling facilities to preserve the produce.

In another scene, leafy vegetables are tightly compressed into sacks strapped onto a bicycle, damaging the crop before it reaches consumers. Together, the images reveal the everyday weaknesses along the cold-chain.

It is this gap that the Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold-Chain (ACES) was established to address using systems to system approach.

Based in Kigali, ACES is training technicians, engineers and innovators to design, operate and maintain sustainable cooling systems. Through training, applied research, the institution is helping develop practical solutions to post-harvest losses.

By treating food loss as a solvable challenge rather than an unavoidable cost, ACES is helping farmers protect incomes, strengthen food security and build more resilient agricultural value chains across Rwanda and beyond.