In africa, Nigeria leads the pack as the country with the highest people living below the poverty line
The whole african continent seems to have this problem tho.

It's probably due to a lack of refrigeration and food preservatives in general. They have a more organic diet with lots of fruits and veggies, wich go bad rather quickly, and poor handling, poor packaging and lack of storage for their produce before it reaches the market contribute greatly.

You can read the report here: https://www.unep.org/resources/report/unep-food-waste-index-report-2021

For african countries it is mainly estimates, but even if the estimation is like 20 or 30% off, it would still be way too much wasted food given the fact that many people don't even have enough food to survive.

Looking at the link from OP, that specific data point seems to be based on the results of this study:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325118509_Determination_and_Quantification_of_Household_Solid_Waste_Generation_for_Planning_Suitable_Sustainable_Waste_Management_in_Nigeria

There's a PDF provided there by the researcher. Methods are on page 3, but to paraphrase, it's based on a stratified random sampling of 100 households (a total of 334 people) in Sapele.

A relevant quote from the results:

>By percentage composition, food waste has the highest (75%), the composition of food waste consists mainly of food left-over, vegetables, fish and meat waste, fruits, peels (cassava, yam, potato, orange, pawpaw, banana, plantain etc.).

They didn't really go into why so much waste is being generated, only suggested that much of this could be composted or used to generate green energy.