A social enterprise that provide households in urban areas of Ethiopia (beginning with Addis Ababa) with access to highly efficient fan-forced gasifier stoves in an innovative way to those who are most in need. Our business model is “improved cookstoves + pellets + charcoal buy-back”, wherein we sell stoves and pellets, and buy-back the charcoal our stove generate by giving the customer equal the mass of the charcoal that they return in new pellet fuel. We convert the charcoal into fertilizer, water, and air filters thereby sequestering carbon.

We provide

Our services are provided through what we call aggregators. For each target area, we identify knowledgeable, trusted, and competent individuals and train them to become aggregators who then sign up customers in the target area and provide service to them via souqs. The latter serve as two-way exchange sites. Customers purchase pellets from the souqs and the souqs in turn buy-back the charcoal that the customers produce. Both the aggregator and the souq work on commission.

It works

We make fuel pellets from biodegradable waste (e.g., spent coffee grounds, coffee husks, sawdust, wood chips, khat stems). Using pellets as a fuel source in gasifier cookstoves is superior to any other solid biomass because pellets are uniform in size, have low moisture content, have a high energy density, and are easier to transport and store. When these pellets are burned in our fan-forced gasifier stoves, they turn into biochar (i.e., charcoal).

It matters

Our business model not only mitigates health impacts from indoor air pollution, it will also sequesters large quantities of carbon by reducing CO2 emission to the atmosphere. By converting large quantities of waste biomass to fuel pellets, we minimize the need to remove wood from forests for cooking. All of this is achieved while creating hundreds of jobs.