Africans rising

Meet Nigerian entrepreneur, Oscar Ekponimo the man finding solutions for food wastage and hunger

Nigerian entrepreneur, Oscar Ekponimo is working to reduce food waste in Nigeria using an app he developed known as Chowberry.

Published

7 years ago

August 14, 2017

Kylie Kiunguyu

Oscar Ekponimo who won the 2016 Rolex award for enterprise, which recognizes extraordinary projects that benefit communities around the world is working to develop his “Chowberry” app further to help cut waste in more parts of the country and enable retailers save money at the same time.

The app he created enables charities to shop for products that are about to expire at a discounted price and facilitates donations from stores of groceries they don’t need to poor families. On the app charities can access products ranging from cereals, cooking oil, powdered milk and even snacks among other groceries.

Ekponimo who is a software engineer said to Africa news that his own experiences growing up without enough to eat, inspired him to come up with the technology.

“There was a phase in the family where my dad was temporally ill and out of work and I remember vividly during that time period the challenge at home was access to wholesome meal or quality meal, we could go a day or two without having a quality meal and this was something that affected me psychologically and also impacted on my academics and I always said sometime in the future I would resolve this problem,” he said.

In Nigeria one-third of children under five are stunted and the conflict waged by Boko Haram militants in the northeast has left over four million people without access to enough food according to the World Food Programme.

Read: Nigeria: Ex Agriculture Minister Dr Akinwumi Adesina wins World Food Prize

And according to U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), approximately a third of food produced around the world is not eaten because it is spoiled after harvest and during transportation, or thrown away by shops and consumers. Throwing out food wastes the water, energy and fuel needed to grow, store and transport it, while discarded food ends up in landfills where it rots, releasing harmful greenhouse gases according to campaigners.

Ekponimo said to CNN that the response to the project has been encouraging and he’s been able to see first hand how it’s transforming lives. “We met one lady who has six children and survives on 400 naira ($1.05)a day,” he said. “She sells firewood and kunu (a local drink). One day the task force seized her kunu for hawking in the street, and she had nothing. She had to feed her family on what she made. So it’s nice to see the impact of what we’re doing.”

He is hopeful that more national retailers will join the scheme as demand for the service continues to grow in the face of Nigeria’s recession. “We went from about 1,500 daily visits to double that. There have been requests and demand, people tell me we really want this, we’re relying on what you guys are doing because things are expensive.”

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The Chowberry app is now functional in Lagos and Abuja as a three-month pilot involving 20 retailers has reached about 300 people in Lagos and Abuja, feeding 150 orphans and at risk children.

“It’s been a wonderful journey,” Ekponimo said. “We’re expanding our work and working on scaling to other parts of the country and to other regions and possibly replicating it in other parts of the world.”