Owusu Akoto is a New York Times-profiled entrepreneur and recently appointed African Advisory Council Member for the Global Cold Chain Alliance (GCCA) - which is the leading industry association, worldwide, for the temperature-controlled logistics sector.

Having spent a decade designing and transforming supply chains at global companies such as Unilever, Proctor and Gamble, and Nestle, Owusu’s imagination was seized by the extraordinary gaps in temperature-sensitive logistics in West Africa. There, the agricultural sector suffers from post-harvest losses as high as 70%; deaths occur far too often because of vaccine-preventable diseases - all because the barriers of cost and complexity place the necessary cold chain infrastructure out of reach of the food and healthcare companies that need them. Moreover, rotting food emits methane, a deadly greenhouse gas, warming the planet and triggering more food loss.

Owusu dug in and FreezeLink was born as the region’s first temperature-controlled logistics one-stop-shop, providing solar-enabled cold chain storage, transport and engineering services to customers, on a pay-as-you-go basis. Besides serving customers like local horticulture exporters as well as the likes of General Mills and Unilever, FreezeLink became the first company in the world to distribute the COVAX vaccines, in the global fight against the Covid-19 pandemic.

This aside, Owusu was awarded an MBA from Imperial College London and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was one of 8 graduates selected out of 2,000 to receive a Senior Honour Award.

“I do not want buildings and roads named after me but I want to enhance as many lives as possible and as much as possible and to do it while I am at the edge of my competence, which is where I find I am the happiest and most effective. On that note, working every day to make food and healthcare products more accessible and affordable in West Africa - with all the technical and commercial challenges that this involves - is the best job in the world.”

Interests: My family, boxing (I watch a lot of old and new fights), behavioral economics, and the Champions League.

Organization: FreezeLink

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