- Toolkit
Behavior Change Intervention For Food Waste Prevention in Sub-Saharan Africa
- November 20, 2025
- 1:06 pm
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BEHAVIORAL THEME
OVERVIEW
Busara has developed a practical, evidence-based toolkit to help practitioners apply behavioral science to reduce food waste. The toolkit takes readers through a step-by-step process, from understanding the problem and uncovering the behavioral drivers behind it, to co-creating and testing solutions and implementing them sustainably.
The toolkit is grounded in Busara’s multi-year experience in Kenya and Nigeria, where extensive research was conducted to understand and solution for the decisions that lead to food waste. The focus of this work was reducing the wastage of “funny-looking” produce, a major source of avoidable loss, among vendors and consumers of Kenya and Nigeria. Using behavioral science tools, Busara designed and tested practical solutions including changes in the display of produce at the stall, pricing strategies and nudges to encourage the purchases of funny-looking produce.
THEMATIC AREAS
Food waste significantly exacerbates food insecurity, with substantial portions of food discarded globally despite widespread hunger, particularly in the Global South. One-third of all food produced for human consumption is wasted by vendors and consumers worldwide (FAO, 2019; 2023), necessitating a focus on reducing waste at points of sale and production.
What if a few simple changes, like rethinking how we display produce, pricing it creatively, and sparking new conversations at the vendors’ stall, could drastically reduce market waste and boost vendor profits? That’s exactly what Busara’s work in Kenya and Nigeria shows, where “funny-loooking produce” was a major contributor to food waste. By introducing simple behavioural solutions, most vendors increased sales and reduced the wastage of funny-looking produce (and thereby food waste), while consumers’ willingness to buy funny-looking produce increased by 22% (Saldanha & Aranha, 2022).
Drawing on these real-world examples, this toolkit equips the readers with proven, evidence-backed techniques from markets like yours, to design interventions, improve food waste outcomes, and track impact.