Dispatches from the Field & Project Summaries
United Nations Development Program – Rwanda (UNDP SGP), Part II: Environmental education off the grid
April 18, 2008
The following day, Francoise took us up into the mountains north of Kigali, to Stella Matutina Secondary School in the community of Shyorongi.
Walking the school property, practicality blended with beauty… rows of bright green cabbages, carefully crafted gravel pathways, prolific groves of banana trees, healthy cows… and students who were benefiting from exposure to simple, common sense technologies that would be considered edgy in the western world.
There’s no education like outright exposure so keep an eye peeled for those Stella Matutina graduates – they’ve got smarts to share. Read on…
As a school utterly off the grid, GEF/ UNDP became involved with the school to help them make steps toward self-sufficiency, teaching educators and students integrated resource management and created an “education in action” school for environmental education that taught conservation, organic farming and sustainable sanitation.
An all-girls school with 430 students, the school received a generous donation and assistance from the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) who helped the design and build a biogas system that would provide an alternative to charcoal and firewood to fuel the school’s kitchen.
Biogas, for the uninitiated, is the methane created by human and animal waste, harvested for fuel. Yep, just that sexy… septic tanks gone wild. But truly, it’s quite wonderful what poo can do for you. I’ll give it an official “ick” on introducing the concept, but it’s really simple, sanitary and smart.
Underground receptacles store waste from the school latrines as well as manure from the school’s resident livestock. Methane rises off the tanks, which flow into gas lines that lead into the school’s kitchen, fueling the commercial cooking burners. While not eliminating the use of firewood, biogas now does the lion’s share of fuel for cooking most of the school’s meals.
Back when the school’s kitchens were reliant on firewood, it took 100 cubic meters of wood to run the kitchen for 9 months. In 2006, after the inception of the biogas program, the school bought another 100 cubic meters of firewood. By March of 2008, they still had half of their original purchase, 50 cubic meters of firewood, left. So, less firewood usage is a good thing!
But biogas is just part of the environmental education at Stella Matutina Secondary School. Like the Gorilla Organization sponsored water cistern projects in Ruhengeri, the school leverages almost daily rainfall and broad classroom roofs to feed massive water cisterns for the school’s drinking and cooking water supply. Students are involved in the acres of gardens on school grounds and all vegetables (yes, ALL vegetables) served in meals for over 400 students are grown in school organic gardens – no mean feat!
United Nations Development Program – Rwanda (UNDP SGP), Part I: Urban sustainability projects 101
April 18, 2008
We step out into a bright morning in Rwanda’s capital city of Kigali to meet Francoise Kayigamba, national coordinator of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) Small Grants Program that focuses on community based projects, managed by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Francoise takes us to Nyakabanda, a low income suburb of Kigali where city garbage is the proverbial straw spun into environmentally-friendly gold.
Rwanda ‘s population density is the highest in Africa. In Kigali, primary fuels for cooking are charcoal + wood and in rural Rwanda, wood is the main fuel source – with all that wood-fueled cooking, pollution and deforestation are significant challenges. Established in 2002, the Association for the Conservation of the Environment (ACEN), is a cooperative supported by the GEF and UNDP that collects household waste from 12,000 families in Kigali. The waste is brought to a central facility where sorters collect high-cellulose components from the refuse including tree and plant fibers: compost, paper, cardboard and wood scrap.
These materials are dried, shredded and compressed into briquettes, a cooking fuel that is far more efficient and cleaner burning than wood or charcoal.But now for a sense of scale: This operation produces 14 tons of briquettes per day that are sold primarily to factories, schools and other institutions. ACEN employs 133 people, the majority of which are women, many of whom are widows and former sex workers, over 50% of them are living with HIV.
ACEN provides its employees with vocational training and daily meals along with a living wage and community – keys to empowerment for people who would otherwise be marginalized, disenfranchised and likely living in abject poverty.
The positives of ACEN’s efforts are multifold:
• Harvesting materials from city waste reduces overall garbage. Aside from making for a cleaner city, it also results in a pronounced reduction of methane that would otherwise have been released into the environment had it been left to decompose.
• The briquettes produced from the waste products are more energy efficient, cleaner burning and cheaper than charcoal or wood.
• It’s a sustainable business in every sense of the word - reducing, reusing garbage, providing a necessary service, creating jobs + offering services and training – empowerment and better lives for the marginalized.
ACEN is just beginning to crack distribution to private households – presently they have only sold about 50 in-home cooking stoves. A typical family will spend about 14,000 Rwandan Francs (about 25 US dollars) on charcoal a month. With the cleaner burning, more energy efficient briquettes, the cost goes down to 2,000 per month (less than 8 dollars) along with the one time purchase of a briquette stove, which runs 8-15,000 (15-28 dollars).
More efficient, kinder to the environment, and more economical…why, then, isn’t everyone adopting them?
A simple phrase: hand-to-mouth living.
Very few households can buy all their monthly charcoal one purchase – they buy just enough to get them through the next few days, a few thousand francs at a time. The outright purchase of a stove, without the briquettes, is more than most of Rwandans have in their pocket, leaving them overextended with no money left to buy fuel to cook with, defeating the purpose of the purchase.
But solutions are in the works: ACEN is gearing up to increase production of high efficiency briquette stoves. GEF is working to create a micro loan program that will make stove purchases much more accessible to the average Rwandan household. Together, ACEN and GEF have created an exciting, sustainable success story that’s benefiting many with the potential of helping countless others.