DelAgua, which provides efficient cooking stoves intended to fight climate change and cut pollution, plans to expand across Africa after installing its millionth wood-fired cooker in Rwanda.

The company says it has funding from Shell Plc for 250,000 stoves and has signed memorandums of understanding to expand into the Gambia, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Burundi.

The cooking stoves are provided through a 2012 program with the Rwandan government to cut the consumption of wood used in rural parts of the country. The aim, using a stove that needs 71% less wood than traditional cooking methods, is to reduce deforestation, cut pollution that causes respiratory disease and lessen the amount of time spent by women and children foraging for fuel.

The cost of each stove is about $80, including education.

“Investors still come to us on genuinely a weekly basis asking if there’s any availability for additional stoves,” said Euan McDougall, DelAgua’s regional director for East Africa. “So we’ve taken that message and realized that we can take this outside of Rwanda.”

DelAgua is part of a wider drive to reduce the use of wood and charcoal for cooking in Africa, with governments promoting the use of liquefied natural gas as an alternative. KOKO Networks has sold hundreds of thousands of ethanol cookers to urban Kenyans and is planning to expand into Rwanda.

The use of the stoves frees up women, who traditionally do the cooking in rural areas of Rwanda, to run businesses or attend to other chores, Jeanne d’Arc Mujawamariya, the country’s environment minister, said on Wednesday at an event where the millionth stove was handed over.

Live Well

DelAgua provides stoves for free in rural Rwanda and trains people how to use them. In total, the cost is about $35 per stove, including distribution, and the company has secured enough funding to provide 2.3 million in Rwanda by early 2024. Its program is called Tubeho Neza, which means ‘live well’ in the local Kinyarwanda language.

“The free issuance model that we use has been one that’s effectively been ignored by the broader clean-cooking community, but it really is the only one that works for these very impoverished rural communities,” McDougall said. “The reason that we are sticking with a wood-fuel stove at the moment is because for the rural communities we serve, that is the only form of fuel that is both available and affordable.”

Founded in 1985 as a provider of clean water-testing kits, with involvement from Oxfam and the University of Surrey, DelAgua decided to start providing stoves in 2011 and partially fund that by selling carbon credits, according to its website. A carbon credit is a token representing a ton of emissions removed, reduced or avoided from the atmosphere. They are bought by companies to offset their own emissions. DelAgua’s credits are from projects certified by Verra, one of the largest offset verification bodies.

Shell declined to comment.

“By the end of this dry season we will have delivered more stoves in a year than we have done in the previous nine years,” Neil McDougall, DelAgua’s chairman, said at the event. “Next year we plan to distribute in excess of 800,000.”

The expansion projects outside Rwanda will start with pilot programs of 25,000 stoves to work out costs, distribution and training, Euan McDougall said.

Ultimately the company would like to raise $200 million to provide 2 million stoves each for Gambia and Burundi, the company’s chairman said.

Across Africa, 850 million to 900 million people use solid fuels, including charcoal and firewood, for cooking. That shortens the lives of more than half a million Africans annually as its produces carbon monoxide, a hazardous gas, and particulate emissions, according to the World Bank.

AE News