Written by The Nigerian Stored Products Research Institute (NSPRI) and Community Action for Food Security, Africa (CAFS Africa) have unveiled a blockchain-enabled solar dryer project backed by the United Nations Development Programme.
This project is targeting the chronic post-harvest losses that drain billions of naira from Nigeria’s food system every year.
The project, titled “Incorporation of Blockchain Technology to Access Climate-Smart Solar Dryers,” was presented in Lagos and is supported through UNDP’s Tadamon Accelerator for Food Security.
It pairs solar-powered drying infrastructure with a blockchain platform designed to track usage, verify access, and build accountability into shared community equipment.
Prof. Lateef Sanni, Executive Director of NSPRI, put the scale of the problem plainly at the unveiling.
Nigeria loses an estimated N3.5 trillion to post-harvest losses annually, with between 30 and 50 per cent of perishable agricultural produce spoiled each year due to inadequate storage, inefficient processing, and limited access to preservation technology.
The losses fall hardest on the people least able to absorb them.
“These losses disproportionately affect smallholder farmers, women processors and rural communities, contributing to reduced incomes, food insecurity and economic inefficiencies,” Prof. Sanni said.
Mr. Azeez Salawu, Founder of CAFS Africa, said the project’s design deliberately addressed two separate failures at once.
The solar dryers handle the physical problem: clean, efficient, climate-resilient drying of produce that would otherwise spoil.
The blockchain layer handles the institutional problem: who has access to shared infrastructure, when, on what terms, and with what verifiable outcomes.
“By integrating solar-powered dryers with blockchain technology, we are not only reducing food losses but also ensuring transparency, equitable access and long-term sustainability,” he added.
Dr. Michael Omodara, the project’s Training and Deployment Expert, said the solar dryers will improve product quality, reduce contamination, and extend shelf life beyond what open-air or fuel-based drying currently achieves.
The blockchain component enables real-time monitoring and accountability, meaning community equipment can be tracked and fairly allocated rather than captured by whoever happens to be nearest or most connected.
The project’s target beneficiaries reflect where post-harvest losses most concentrate: smallholder farmers, women involved in food processing, and youths recruited as technicians and digital facilitators.
That design is intentional. Post-harvest loss in Nigeria is not only a technology problem. It is a capacity and access problem, and technology deployed without trained users and fair access systems tends to centralise into the hands of the few farmers already better positioned than most.
This is not NSPRI’s first solar dryer deployment. The institute has previously installed parabolic solar dryer facilities in states including Ebonyi, providing support to farmer communities at no cost, with plans to extend the technology to Akwa-Ibom, Niger, Ekiti, Kwara, and others. (AgriFocus Africa) What the new CAFS partnership adds is the blockchain layer and the UNDP-backed scale ambition of the Tadamon Accelerator, which is running similar technology-and-food-security projects across the West Africa region.
Whether the blockchain component translates into measurable improvements in access equity, or remains a technical feature with limited practical uptake at the grassroots, will be the real test of this project’s design within the first year of deployment.
Source: News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), May 8, 2026
