Dispatches
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.
