Digital Technologies for Integrated Food Loss and Waste Reduction in Agrifood Chains in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Scoping Review

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is grappling with a food insecurity crisis exacerbated by the decline in agriculture production and food loss and waste (FLW) that requires immediate attention. The challenge of declining agricultural production and FLW in agrifood chains has devastating consequences ranging from farmers and retailers losing income to the region's population's well-being. Given the critical challenge of food insecurity in SSA, this review paper explores prospective opportunities for digital technologies application in agrifood chains to facilitate an integrated approach to FLW reduction management. The scoping review 5-stage framework is employed to select relevant articles from Google scholar database over a 10-year timeframe period (2013-2022). The findings suggest that digital technologies such as Internet of Things, big data analytics, and Artificial Intelligence can help to reduce FLW by increasing efficiency, improving coordination, and connectivity in the agrifood chain phases, and thus creating value added transformation in agrifood chains. However, contextual factors such as inadequate digital skills, digital divide and connectivity issues that hinder effective use of technologies in SSA must be addressed if the region is to realise their transformative potential. This paper aims to add to the body of knowledge by highlighting potential opportunities to use digital technology to facilitate FLW reduction in SSA, to address crisis of food insecurity in SSA and, by extension, Africa.