Eighteen months ago, I was asked by the Rwandan Government to move the Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold-Chain (ACES) from a great idea, but with too long a gestation process, to reality. A new ACES Board of Directors was appointed. We recruited fast from the local market – lecturers and the back office support team. And with colleagues from Birmingham, Cranfield, London South Bank and also industry such as Danston UK Limited, we rolled up our sleeves and changed tack from technical advisors and systems developers to hands-on delivery partners and mentors. This week, I sat down and did the half-yearly analysis of what the team has built since — and I want to share it, because the numbers say something far bigger than one institute. In the first half of this year, we trained 821 people in refrigeration, cooling and cold-chain for food and one health – the skills that keep vaccines viable, food unspoiled, and smallholder farmers in business. Nearly a third were women. Across 25 pre/post-tested courses, the average normalised knowledge gain (Hake's g) was 0.57. Several ACES courses scored 0.74–0.82, in the 'high' band. 94 per cent of student finished what they started; student satisfaction is more than 90 per cent. Then, we costed it honestly. Not the cash price — the full economic cost, audited, the way a UK university calculates it under TRAC: lecturers, estates, overheads, a sustainability margin, all of it. It came out at about a third to a half the cost of an equivalent international qualification per trainee. So, here is what I keep coming back to: world-standard technical training, delivered in Africa, for Africa, at a fraction of the cost of doing it in the UK — and reaching exactly the people the sector has always left out: The young women retraining as technicians. The 500+ schoolchildren who came to see that cooling is engineering, not magic. The dairy farmers whose milk now survives the journey to market because we trained the people who keep the solar cold-rooms running. And in Lari, Kenya, through our first outreach SPOKE — a community cooling hub run hand-in-hand with a local farmers’ cooperative — farmers who once lost up to half of their produce now earn two to three times the price for their crops, and the cooperative has grown from 20 members to 242, nearly half of them women. In the same months, we convened the UK–Rwanda Climate Partnership Conference with 150 leaders and ministers from both governments. Last year, we hosted a first-of-a-kind Festival of Cooling that drew nearly 700 people and three Rwandan and one UK Minister to attend. And we have lodged four postgraduate programmes for accreditation. We are training 100 technicians to Bronze and Silver level for the Rwanda Dairy Development Project (RDDP) and providing the independent technical review and validation for its solar-powered milk collection centres. And ACES now sits at the centre of around 29 collaborative partnerships and MoUs, spanning industry, development institutions and Rwandan government bodies. The conventional wisdom is that high-quality technical skills are hard and expensive to deliver in lower-resource settings – that completion will be low, that learning will be thin, that women won't come. The evidence says the opposite. The appetite is there. The aptitude is there. What was missing was the model – and the belief that it could be built here. It can. We're proving it. Yes, we have made mistakes along the journey – to be expected from such rapid growth. But the numbers confirm the impact and the value for money with strong performance across economy, efficiency, effectiveness and equity. And mistakes are the learnings, and we now have the success and evidence on which to move from start-up to resilient stand-up. This month, at London Climate Action Week, Ashley Woodcock, who chairs the Montreal Protocol’s Technology and Economic Assessment Panel, held ACES up as the model: training to international standards, on real equipment rather than poor kit dumped in Africa, with genuine impact on the ground. ACES, he said, is a blueprint worth multiplying – the world “probably needs about 10 or a dozen of these around the world.” To the team in Kigali who did the work, the universities and international partners who designed the courses and methods and supported the in-country teams, and to the founding partners –Carrier, Danfoss, REMA, FAO, the UK and Rwandan governments, and many more – who backed it when it would have been easier not to: thank you. We are only getting started. The writer is the Executive Director of the Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold-Chain (ACES) and a global pioneer in sustainable cooling and cold-chain systems. He is also the co-Inventor of Liquid Air Energy Storage and the co-Founder of Highview Power and a Professor of Cold Economy, University of Birmingham and Heriot-Watt University.
