The context

The Basel Agency for Sustainable Energy (BASE) is a nonprofit organization that develops innovative, actionable financial strategies and market-driven solutions to unlock investment in climate change solutions. Base detected that smallholder farmers in developing countries are often unaware of the technical aspects of how to better preserve their produce. They also might have difficulty in understanding the complex market dynamics underlying crop prices. As a result, it is hard for them to leverage information to their advantage which results in loss of income and crop wastage. Jointly with Empa (the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology) BASE wanted to develop an open-access, data science-based mobile application to provide real-time instructions to smallholder farmers in India on how to control storage products to minimize food loss and maximize market value. The first version of the mobile app is available here.