Chowberry App feeds hungry, poor families in Abuja

IN other to curb the menace of food poverty in Nigeria and Africa as a whole, Chowberry, a technology driven social enterprise and innovation of a Nigerian tech entrepreneur, Oscar Ekponimo, has recently partnered with charitable organisations and reached out to indigent families in Gishiri Village, a rural community in the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja.

The free food distribution was held in conjunction with food retailers and supermarkets in the city, engaging with the innovative web based software application called Chowberry to connect needy and impoverished families.

The foods distributed are those that would otherwise go to waste due to expiration and they were gathered through partnerships with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and charity organisations.

According to the young and budding techpreneur, Ekponimo, “The programme, Project FoodAccess, is designed to provide nutritious food to selected families in various communities and help reduce the challenge of hunger and food deprivation. The recent programme, which was held at Gishiri community spanned duration of three days.

“The first day involved entry into Gishiri community, meeting with five families that were in dire need of support, distribution of food products to selected families by the NGOs using Chowberry. A stakeholder summit was later held with charities, and the retailers.’’

Explaining more on how the Chowberry app works, Ekponimo stated that, “Using the Chowberry platform, our partner NGO use the service to source affordable nutrition mainly food products nearing end of shelf-life listed by retail stores for the beneficiaries.

“The NGO is also responsible for pickup and distribution to the local and impoverished families. The recently held campaign was in Gishiri community and we aim to impact more families with Chowberry and improve our social enterprise while staying true to reaching households with affordable nutrition.

“Chowberry is a web based software that helps retailers track and monitor food products approaching the end of shelf-life, the same monitored products are analysed and streamed as deep discount via a proprietary algorithm from which NGO’s and low income earners can purchase affordable and low priced food items to meet their nutrition needs,” he added.

According to Ekponimo, the criteria for choosing the families include, “the profiling of families and households is the sole responsibility of the partner – NGO, mainly using standard targeting mechanisms. The determining factor include the lowest quintile by average monthly income, overall assets evaluation, special preference to female head of households, families of young mothers with school age children, among others.

It will be recalled that Chowberry, after winning the prestigious Rolex Award for Enterprise in 2016, has enjoyed huge applauds and international recognition in its feat of feeding poor Nigerians through tech innovation. This includes international media coverage by CNN, BBC and Times Magazine.