Cookstove 2013 Ashden Award Winners and Runners-up

July 1, 2013 · 2 comments

2013 Ashden Award Winners | Source: Ashden, June 2013

“The Ashden Awards bring to light ground-breaking green energy champions in the UK and developing world and inspire others to follow. From an enterprise bringing clean stoves to rural Africa to a Cornish school embracing energy-saving across its learning and practice, our winners are passionate about bringing change to their communities and the planet. At the heart of the Ashden Awards is a rigorous judging process culminating in a prestigious ceremony in London where prizes are presented to winners from all corners of the globe to help further their work.”

Below are Ashden award winning and runner-up cookstove initiatives and and a complete list of winners is at the link above:

SolarAid – International Gold Award | Creative distribution brings solar power to East Africa’s rural poor

With the audacious goal of eliminating the kerosene lamp from Africa by 2020, Solar Aid’s sales teams work with schools in rural areas to promote good quality, affordable lights to families. With over 400,000 lamps sold since 2010, the organisation is now the largest distributer of solar lights in Africa.

The immediate benefits are immeasurable: children are able to study in the evening, polluting and dangerous kerosene is avoided, and families save money. And by using competitive procurement, SolarAid is helping raise standards across the industry.

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Impact CarbonCiti Ashden Award for Financial Innovation | Catalysing the growth of the East African stove market

Across the developing world, small businesses are selling life-saving technologies like cleaner cookstoves that reduce indoor air pollution. Many of them need help to achieve their potential. Impact Carbon works with stove and water filter enterprises across East Africa, China and elsewhere to access carbon finance, then uses the money to work intensely with them to help them build their businesses and help make the stoves more affordable for the people who want to buy them.

A shop in Goma selling fuel-efficient stoves

Uganda is Impact Carbon’s biggest market, where the five stove businesses it works with have dramatically increased sales and capacity: for example, the country’s biggest stove manufacturer has increased sales from 200 a month in 2007 to more than 10,000 a month in 2013.

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WWF – DRC – Waterloo Foundation Ashden Award for Avoided Deforestation | Grass-roots cookstoves project protects forests and helps families

Rapid deforestation in the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo is threatening its fragile ecosystem and over half the world’s population of highly endangered mountain gorillas. Meanwhile, for Goma’s burgeoning population, spending a high proportion of their income on illegally plundered charcoal makes climbing out of poverty an impossible dream.

WWF is training local businesses to build and sell cheap, culturally appropriate stoves that halve the amount of charcoal needed, so helping protect the sensitive forest environment. It’s also helping landowners start sustainable tree plantations for charcoal, to help meet Goma’s needs. So far 45,000 stoves have been sold.

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Runners-up

Cookswell Jikos – A ‘seed to ash’ approach to cleaner cookstoves

The late Dr Maxwell Kinyanjui was a pioneer in improving the sustainability of charcoal in Kenya, developing the charcoal-saving Kenya Ceramic Jiko and other technologies, and promoting commercial reforestation and efficient charcoal production. As such, the Kenyan business is unique in its ‘seed to ash’ approach to cookstoves which takes into account the entire lifecycle of wood.

Dr Kinyanjui’s family continue to take his ideas forward. While startup business Cookswell Jikos sells jikos, charcoal ovens, and small charcoal kilns,its partner the Woodlands Trust is responsible for developing new plantations.

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MicroEnergy Credits – Helping microfinance providers finance clean energy products

Lack of finance can be a major stumbling block for people in developing countries who want to buy renewable energy products, with even the cheapest solar lanterns out of reach for many. The US business MicroEnergy Credits (MEC) is a business that helps microfinance institutions promote and provide loans for these products. As well as supporting microfinance lenders to put their programmes in place it helps them access carbon finance.

So far MEC has supported microfinance providers to sell more than 180,000 renewable energy products, including stoves and solar homes systems. Its largest programme is with XacBank in Mongolia.

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