Clean & improved cookstoves in Choma, Zambia

Pilot Project: Subscribe to planned carbon credits from this clean cookstove project that aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and toxic fumes in households. (pilot stage project).

What?

Help 500 Zambian households switch from dirty cooking methods to healthy, greener cooking with a more efficient cookstove.

Why?

Worldwide, billions of people mainly cook with polluting fuels and technologies, including solid fuel and biomass such as wood, charcoal, animal dung, crop residues, and coal. These fuels release plumes of smoke and soot with significant health impacts that contribute to millions of premature deaths each year.  

The World Health Organisation estimates that about 7,800 people in Zambia die annually from conditions linked to indoor air pollution – most of which is caused by cooking sources. Traditional cooking practices also produce greenhouse gas emissions. These emissions stem from two sources. First, unsustainable harvesting of fuel drives forest degradation and prevents reforestation. Second, burning fuels during the cooking process emits carbon dioxide, methane, and other pollutants.

Where?

In Choma, in the south of Zambia. While clean cookstoves have been introduced to Africa a few decades ago, uptake in Zambia is low, mostly because they are unaffordable. With over 80% of the population using dirty cookstoves, the country ranks below average in Africa.

What is the impact?

With households switching to premium clean cooking the expected benefits are

- Health: well established benefits to the household based on scientific studies on cooking stoves and methods, reducing hospitalizations, respiratory problems and also fewer deaths

- Emissions: based on scientific studies with cookstoves, with people switching from open-fire to clean cookstoves, Carbon emissions into the air from the open fuel burning are reduced. Over the mean lifespan of the stove of over 5 years, this results in substantial improvement in emissions at scale.

- Time-saving: Hours spent gathering wood daily as opposed to buying briquettes typically happens once a week and takes 1 hour.

Which cookstoves?

For this pilot we provide households with the Berkeley-Darfur Stove, a product that has been used in other cookstove carbon credit programmes. Households will use 66% less fuel and save 1 hour a day due to faster cooking.

What is so unique about this approach?

While there are dozens of other carbon credit cookstove projects across the world, there is none that combine all these aspects:

- High percentage of carbon credit proceeds go to local economy

- Transparency: data, including outcome and impact data available through dashboard in near real-time. Green People & TrueFootprint platforms ensure verification of the project over its life and credibility of the credits by creating an auditable, verifiable ledger.

Why will this work?

- Households: people will want to switch to clean cooking because it is time-saving and healthier. Quite a few will like the environmental benefits as well. 

- Manufacturers: our bulk order helps make running their business more predictable. They will maintain a healthy margin to keep their business sustainable

- Partners: dedicated to the community, we ensure their commission is above market rates so they can blossom and grow their local social enterprise. They have no upfront costs. To encourage them doing a good job maintaining the project, we pay them not just for sales but also partly for sustained app usage. These are not random businesses but selected from our own network built up over decades of development work

- Carbon credit buyers: not just any carbon credits good for the environment but credits that have human benefits: health, time-saving

Beginning of a journey

This is a small scale project that is the beginning of our journey towards clean cooking across Africa and Asia.

*Upcoming Project*- Please get in touch through the contacts and appointments page.