Dr Eric Tutu Tchao

The food production and processing environment in many sub-Saharan countries are deteriorating. In Ghana, rapid urbanisation has led to urban, peri-urban and, increasingly, rural households becoming more reliant on unhealthy, ultra-processed food from the traditional food and retail system. This has led to an increase in the associated effects of unhealthy foods such as obesity and non-communicable diseases (NCDs) – the latter being reported as the cause of more than 50% of all reported adult deaths in the area.

Ghana has published a national NCD prevention policy and strategy, recognising crucial interventions to promote healthy foods. Local policymakers have indicated that tackling unhealthy food production and improving food processing would be the most effective tools to address the issue. But NCD prevention is hampered by scarce resources, lack of data from the value chain for decision-making, lack of appropriate technological interventions and lack of monitoring in the country. Value chain monitoring – if available – is done by governmental agencies or sales channels, such as large retail chains, often with proprietary and closed solutions.

Headline-grabbing incidents, some resulting in the death of customers, have changed how consumers look at food – they now put tremendous emphasis on food traceability. Dr Eric Tutu Tchao will address this issue through his Future Africa Research Leader Fellowship (FAR-LeaF) research project, titled ‘Development of an open toolbox for safe food monitoring (DOTbox)’.

DOTbox aims to create a new toolbox for processing, tracking and tracing agricultural and food products that will lower the friction of implementing a blockchain into existing platforms and systems. The study will introduce companies to the blockchain and increase the number of businesses leveraging the advantages of blockchains to add value to consumers in Ghana and sub-Saharan Africa.

Dr Tchao plans to build, pilot and showcase his open-source, cost-effective toolbox, test it and teach it in real-life use, and evaluate the whole system. He foresees the solutions developed in this project giving farmers and other producers of agriculture-related products more control over how they would like their products to be digitalised without spending enormous amounts of money developing their solutions.

Dr Tchao will explore possibilities for integrating distribute ledger technologies in the area, and evaluate technologies and solutions to incorporate low-complexity devices, such as old-generation smartphones, into a blockchain to secure deep integration into production processes. To ensure that no incorrect or manipulated information is put into the blockchain, controls and plausibility checks need to be embedded into the features of the input devices. The researchers will need to conceptualise, implement and validate prototypes for integrating food production elements into distributed ledger solutions, and evaluate the performances and possible trade-offs of deploying the developed prototypes in the Ghanaian food industry.


Dr Eric Tutu Tchao is a senior lecturer in the Department of Computer Engineering at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Ghana. He has a PhD in Telecommunications Engineering from KNUST, where he worked on analysing MIMO Antenna Configuration Effects on WiMAX Networks Deployments. He is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Communications Society and the Internet Society. He is also a member of the Internet Engineering Task Force’s Special Working Group on IP over IEEE 802.16 (WiMAX) networks and is the Responsible Artificial Intelligence Lab Partnership coordinator. He is a DFG (German Research Foundation) Scholar and a postdoctoral research fellow of the World Academy of Sciences. Dr Tchao’s research interests cover optimisations in blockchain and Internet of Things networks, and Artificial Intelligence for Development in Africa.