The Postharvest Education Foundation: Using E-Learning to Help Stakeholders Prevent Postharvest Loss

Imagine this: you spend all season growing, watering, tilling, fertilizing, and tending to your crops. When it comes time to harvest, a significant portion cannot be reaped for profit. It’s an issue plaguing farmers around the world. It is estimated that globally about 30% of the total foods produced are damaged or lost during harvest, postharvest handling, storage, on the journey from farm to market, or in the home. In some developing nations, depending on the commodity, these losses can extend to more than 50%. 

The Postharvest Education Foundation (PEF) was created with the primary goal of preventing and reducing postharvest losses in developing countries through intensive informal specialty education. Their approach is to train local postharvest specialists through innovative mentor-guided e-learning programs, conducting workshops, and supplying them with postharvest tools. Additionally, PEF offers long-term mentoring to establish socio-economic development and support healthy rural communities, small-scale farmers, and food-related businesses in their home countries.  

Demonstration of postharvest tools to farmer groups in Kimende, Kenya.

Postharvest loss reduction is increasingly being cited as a sustainable means to reduce global hunger and malnutrition and to reduce carbon emissions. It is imperative that farmers and stakeholders have access to information that can reduce their postharvest loss, not just for personal gain, but for the health of our food planet. Since its establishment 13 years ago, the initiative claims to have trained 181 people as postharvest specialists in 31 countries, predominantly from Africa (18 nations) and Asia (9 nations).  

The PEF target audience is young graduates in middle- and low-income nations; the program content is in a simple format relevant even to small landholding farmers, who constitute the majority of farmers in developing countries. Their graduates work as extension workers and postharvest technology consultants and have trained thousands of farmers—crucially, PEF isn’t just about training the person who takes their course. The initiative is focused on creating a chain reaction of knowledge transfer. Importantly, PEF claims to stand out from other e-learning programs that can be prohibitively expensive and thus sometimes inaccessible to those who would most benefit. 

PEF’s long-term vision is to design and launch Postharvest Training and Services Centers (PTSCs) in developing countries in Africa and South Asia to fill the many local gaps in food handling education, information, advice, tools, supplies, and services such as cooling, packing, and food storage. There is no reason why people should go hungry, why small-scale farmers should suffer harvest losses that decimate their livelihood, and why perfectly good food should go to waste. The PEF hopes to help farmers find smart, easy solutions to a manageable problem. 

Learn more about The Postharvest Education Foundation.

Written by Sarah Souli
Photos provided by The Postharvest Education Foundation

Training session in Hondorus on constructing a Zero Energy Cooling Chamber, a small scale cooling solution.

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