Adekoyejo Kuye has the unhurried air of a man with nowhere else to be. He is the sort of person you can listen to for hours without noticing you have been sitting at the same table. We meet on July 28 at Somerset Westview in Kilimani, Nairobi. Kuye is in town for Halcyon’s Africa Food & Climate Resilience programme, where his company is part of the 2026 cohort. He sits easily, speaks without hurry, and rarely seems to search for a thought. Kuye is the founder of KAMIM Technologies, a Nigerian climate-tech company that builds solar-powered cold storage infrastructure and connects farmers to markets. It is not the company Kuye imagined himself building. In fact, he never imagined building a company at all. The son of a chemical engineering professor and a nurse, Kuye grew up taking toys apart to understand how they worked and expected to become a mechanical engineer working on cars. During his national youth service, he was posted to a rural community in Enugu State, Southeastern Nigeria, where he also worked unpaid for a solar company, carrying panels and batteries into communities, and began to understand the everyday problems farmers faced. He later left for Germany for a master’s in renewable energy, financing his studies with factory jobs and night shifts at Amazon. When he finished, staying offered the safer, more obvious path. Friends and family urged him to take it. Instead, Kuye bought a one-way ticket to Nigeria without telling anyone. “Are they using juju to pull you home?” he recalls someone asking. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Nigeria loses enormous amounts of food before it ever reaches consumers. Was there a single moment when you realised the country’s biggest agricultural problem wasn’t production, but preservation? I have an engineering background and started my career at a solar company. We built mini-grids in rural communities, mainly powering healthcare centres, schools and other infrastructure. It was going into those communities that I began to see the problem. A lot of the people were farmers. We would install mini-grids there, but over time, we noticed that many could not afford to pay for solar home systems because what we were providing did not necessarily have productive value for their livelihoods. That got me thinking: how can we build something that actually improves what these farmers are already doing? I started asking them questions. They told me, “This is what we’re facing. Once we harvest, we have to quickly take everything to the market and sell it because there is no infrastructure to preserve it.” I wasn’t fully aware of the scale of the problem initially. But after those conversations, I started doing my own research. Cold storage at the farm gate was almost non-existent. You see cold rooms in urban areas, supermarkets, and large farms, but they weren’t common near smallholder farmers. Yet we produce a lot of perishables in Nigeria—vegetables, tomatoes, and other produce that are very sensitive to heat. There is something called pre-cooling. Once you harvest, rapidly removing the heat from the produce can significantly extend its shelf life. That basic infrastructure simply wasn’t there. That was when I realised there was a major gap. Kuye speaking at a past Halcyon function. Image source: KAMIM You trained as an engineer. At what point did engineering stop being a profession and become a way of thinking about society? I love being on the field. We go into a community, deploy a system, and leave. I just love the process of building stuff. I had no plan to run a business. I’m not a natural businessman who always knew, “Ah, I’m going to become an entrepreneur.” Everything I know about business, I learned on the job out of necessity. But when we started working on cold storage, I knew we had stumbled on something big. We were solving a real problem affecting people’s lives. Farmers would tell us, “This is the business I use to feed my family. This is what my wife does.” It became more than building cold rooms. Then we discovered another problem: affordability. Smallholder farmers cannot afford to buy cold rooms. So you start asking, “How do you finance them?” How do you create a business model that makes the infrastructure sustainable? Many people avoid this space because it is difficult. Traditional financing institutions ask: How will the farmer pay? Can they pay back? But we said, “We’re already in this thing. We need to find a way to make it work.” I’ve been working on agricultural cold-chain infrastructure full-time since 2019, collaborating with farmers, impact investors, and people in the climate space to develop various models. One experience I’ll never forget was deploying our first solution. When we initially visited the community, farmers told us that after harvesting tomatoes, they put them under a tree or found somewhere cool. That was their storage system. They only knew cold rooms for fish and meat. The idea of storing tomatoes in one place was completely new. So we did an experiment. We kept some tomatoes outside and put others inside the cold room. After 21 days, we showed them the difference. You needed to see their faces. That was when I knew: okay, we are doing something important. Growing up, what was the dinner table like? Were conversations about politics, business, faith, or simply getting through the week? I grew up in an engineering home. My father is a professor of chemical engineering. My mother was a nurse. My sister also studied engineering. It was a very academic home: do your work, do what you’re supposed to do. Like most African homes, ours was religious. You went for Bible study during the week, and church on Sunday. That was always part of our lives. But academics were a big thing. From a young age, I knew I wanted to do engineering. I had toys, and the first thing I would do was scatter them. I wanted to open
Read More