Emerging learnings from PAYC in Zambia

Kukula Seed partnered with Frontier Technologies Livestreaming (FTL) and DfID to pilot a Pay-As-You-Chill (PAYC) cold storage solutions in Zambia. The first stage was to target market vendors to test whether this segment would engage in this solution and adopt it to be part of their daily market activity. Here’s what we have learned so far:

1. Market vendors are very sensitive to business cycle activity in the market place that normally dictates prices of the goods they sell. With most market sellers coming from low-income households, wallet size is extremely limited and hard to fight over to get a piece of.
2. Market engagement is absolutely key for a market-focused innovative solution. Market vendors must be brought on to buy into the solution from the get-go to gradually educate them on the advantages of the solution and what it could mean to their business.
3. Want vs Need: where do market vendors lie on this scale on their viewpoint of engaging with this solution?

The PAYC cold storage pilot over the first two sprints center around the above learnings and their results are a great base for valuable learnings from this innovation. To start, what we realized at the end of sprint 2 is market vendors do not sit on their goods by day end to go back home with. The goal of the marketeer is to sell all of their produce by market close at whatever price possible. This means they will start selling high and by end sell low so no produce is left which to them is a loss in income. In this regard, a pay-as-you-go model for a new innovation will find it challenging to penetrate this cycle when wallet sizes dwindle throughout the day.

This makes market engagement exceedingly essential and the key to promoting a new innovation like PAYC cold chain solution. Here, you need all allies possible. Markets are always managed by local government/municipalities via market associations of which understand and grasp fairly well what the needs of their marketeers are. Having them on your side to promote this innovation is vastly important in getting buy-in from the vendors. Zambian markets have community influencers (such as women’s groups, church groups, political groups, etc.) that can really help in getting the word out there to try out a new thing. Conclusively, we understand the need to engage directly with the market vendors at a gradual pace to ensure sufficient utilization of cold storage solutions.

Hence, we fall on the want vs need scale and which side do the market vendors fit. We do know — through market research on the ground and feedback from community influencers — market vendors want to be able to use cold storage which helps them save on transportation costs for bringing in their produce for the day and gives possibilities to sell goods at high prices due to kept freshness of produce. The need is where the trick is! With limited disposable income and the necessity to sell off all their produce, cold storage solutions are very hard to fit into that business cycle. In the long term, potentially, but in the short term, very challenging.

We must then fall back to the biggest question this pilot set out to ask when starting out and that is, where is all the food wastage coming from? I believe we have an answer for that in sprint 3. Tune in!