LIVE WELL, COOK BETTER

Sustainable Business Magazine speaks to Kate Bruges, Communications Director at DelAgua, about the company’s incredible project to provide stoves to every poor rural household in Rwanda – and how its doing it through carbon credits.

DelAgua is engaged in an extraordinary project in Rwanda. It is committed to providing every single household in the country’s poorest rural areas with a brand new, highly efficient cooking stove. Crucially, the company is on track to complete this feat by 2024.

Kate Bruges, Communications Director at DelAgua, shares with Sustainable Business Magazine how the company started on this road – and why its name is DelAgua:

“Neil McDougall is the chairman and founded the business. His background is in the water industry, becoming very successful during the privatisation of water companies. McDougall wanted to really give back, so he worked with the University of Surrey on the development of a very robust water testing kit. These filters are still produced today and used by aid agencies when they want to test the quality of the water particularly, for example after a natural disaster. That’s the reason for the company’s name. DelAgua then produced a household water filter for individual households. It enabled almost any water to be filtered into potable water, and it was the product that McDougall first took to Rwanda.

“However, over time and after discussions with the Rwandan government, it became very apparent that clean cooking was a bigger issue. If we could provide a clean-cooking stove, then we’ve automatically given a family the ability to create clean water. As a result, we very quickly switched to a clean cooking stove program. That was about 10 years ago.”

DelAgua’s long-running Rwandan stove program – called Tubeho Neza, which means “Live Well” in the local language –began slowly, but more recently has picked up speed rapidly.

“To put it into context, until about the beginning of 2021, we had given out 600,000 free stoves,” says Ms. Bruges. “That is a very substantial number of stoves. Yet, by the end of 2021, we’d ramped up that number to 1.2 million stoves in Rwanda. Today, we are fully funded and on-track to provide 2.3 million stoves in by the beginning of 2024. That will be one stove for every single rural household. It’s the biggest stove project of its kind in Africa.”

IN IT FOR THE LONG-TERM

A stove is little help by itself, though. That’s why DelAgua nests the stove within a program of support and long-term care. Ms. Bruges explains how the program does this:

“It’s not enough simply to provide a stove. You can’t just drop the stoves, do a bit of training and go. So the way we work is by providing the stove along with an integrated education and support program that exists throughout the stove’s life.

“In Rwanda, we work with community health workers (CHWs). They are a community-based network formed by local people. We then have an agreement with the government of Rwanda to train and pay those CHWs to work with us: help distribute the stoves, visit and educate the households, and provide long-term help with the stove. We currently employ 6,000 CHWs in Rwanda.

“A CHW will visit for a one-on-one visit with the woman of the household – and its usually women – after she has collected the stove. The CHW spends about an hour with them, showing them how to use the stove, and explaining why they should use it. This part is very important due to the air pollution of traditional cooking methods. Many families either cook inside, or cook in an outbuilding that’s effectively indoors, creating a very smokey atmosphere. Because it is women and children doing the cooking, they are the ones that ultimately suffer.

“Following the one-on-one session, CHWs visit every single household with a stove twice a year. They conduct a survey, which is around 125 questions, to gather data that is then uploaded to the cloud. They are physically with the family so they can see the stove is still there, and they can see that it’s still functioning. If it isn’t they’re able to help with repairing or replacing the stove.”

A Fundamental Shift

In maximising accessibility, DelAgua designed its stove for simplicity of use.

“What we’ve found is that when a family receives the stove at the distribution, they might not get the household visit for maybe three or four days after that,” Ms. Bruges says. “They’re told not to use the stove until they’ve had their household, but they are so easy to use that the households tend to open them up and use them from day one.”

However, simplicity of use wasn’t DelAgua’s only concern during the design process. It needed the stove to work for women, and not the other way around. That’s why, as Ms. Bruges explains, the company spent time understanding the daily reality of households in Rwanda’s poorest rural regions:

“There have been stove programmes in the past that were technically advanced but not so great for actually cooking. They were given to the women and didn’t get used. The issue we tackled was not to fix the women but to fix the stove.

“Our stove’s fundamental shift is that it uses 71% less wood than women currently use for cooking. It uses tiny little sticks. You can put three or four sticks in a little tray and it lights very quickly. You can go from an unlit stove to boiled water in 10 minutes. The women cooking have, in the past, had to spend four or five hours a day gathering enough wood for the fires before they even start cooking. Sometimes they don’t find enough wood, so they then can’t cook. Our stove is actually the world’s most fuel efficient domestic stove and helps remedy these issues. That’s why households across Rwanda have continued using our stoves.”

DelAgua’s stove distribution program doesn’t only benefit households in Rwanda’s rural regions. It plays an important part in supporting both the local and regional economy. While every stove it distributes is free, the company is paying the CHWs that support the program.

“The 6000 CHWs, they’re all deep in those rural communities, that’s where they live,” Ms. Bruges explains. “We’re able to give them high-quality, long-term paid employment. That’s incredibly scarce. It’s scarce anywhere in Rwanda, but it’s very scarce in the rural areas because it’s effectively it’s just a subsistence lifestyle there. And, of course, the CHWs also receive a stove for themselves.”

Furthermore, the manufacture of the stove takes place in nearby Kenya. As Ms. Bruges outlines, this gives DelAgua the opportunity to support the regional economy:

“One thing we get asked is why don’t we use a stove that’s built in Rwanda or Burundi. Well, it’s really important that we give these women a stove that is a step change in performance compared with what have now. Otherwise, the environment doesn’t gain and they don’t get the health benefits. Although the stove looks relatively simple, producing a stove of that standard and with such high quality materials isn’t possible in Rwanda right now. The good news is that we work with Burn, based in Kenya, so it’s building the regional economy and helps keep shipping costs relatively low.”

Global Good Awards

DelAgua’s work hasn’t gone unnoticed. In October 2022, as the company’s Rwandan stoves program was reaching its tenth anniversary, it was subject to a milestone accolade: a Global Good Award for Community Partnership. Ms. Bruges explains what this meant to the company and its people:

“It was brilliant in two very important ways. Firstly, it helped lift international awareness of the work our people do. Initially, we were completely below the radar. Our global team is very small, there’s about sic of us. Our model is about recruiting local talent, so nearly all of our resources goes towards that. All our local country directors, all of our teams, they’re local within the country. We only started building our public profile about two years ago, and that decision was made because we realised needed people to know about what we do as external investment is crucial to ramping up the program.

“Our upfront investments are demanding. We have to purchase stoves and set up the whole programme before it even begins, and that costs millions. Therefore, we needed to put our head above the parapet and raise awareness. The Global Good Award is really helpful for that. It carries the reputation of integrity through the objectivity of an informed judging panel that has looked at what we’re doing. That sort of things boosts confidence in investors.

“The second important impact of the award is that it helped our people feel like their difficult work is truly valued. They already know they’re doing something phenomenal that no-one else is doing at this scale and pace. During the distribution season, which in Rwanda is May to October, they will work up to six days a week, getting 800 stoves out every single day. But there wasn’t any clear way of understanding that the work is valued not just by those communities but by others too. As a result, the Global Good Award, when we received it, was so motivating for our staff. It also helped us attract interest from more local talent that we want to work with as we expand. As our programs are expanding very quickly right now, the award couldn’t have come at a better time.”

It’s clear that the Global Good Award was an important moment for the company’s future prospects, both in terms of financial and human resources. However, there’s one further significant impact it has had.

“Our carbon credits, issued by Vera, are for the voluntary carbon market, and this carbon market is increasingly important today,” Ms. Bruges says. “Every commentator will tell you that we will not reach our climate and net zero goals unless we have a very active voluntary carbon market. But one of the big challenges of the market is investor confidence, which is built around the integrity of the carbon credits. Investors ask questions such as: ‘Are the credits generated by this project really doing what they say they’re going to do?’ DelAgua is already very transparent about every aspect of the projects. Having third party independent scrutiny of that, though, is a really key way for us to demonstrate the absolute integrity of what we do – and therefore the value of the credits. That attracts further investment. The

Global Good Awards, because of the way they’re set up, because of they way they’re judged, and because of the integrity around them, it builds a sense of objective assessment of us.”

Burundi And Gambia

DelAgua expects to have delivered one of its Tubeho Neza stoves to every poor rural household in Rwanda by the end of 2024, approximately 12 years after the project began. However, that isn’t the end of its work. Buoyed by the increasing rapidity of its success in recent years, DelAgua has already started rolling out similar programs in other countries. The first of these is Burundi, which by GDP per capita is the poorest country in the world.

“We’ve already signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Environment, Agriculture and Livestock,” Ms. Bruges states. “We have set up our operations there, starting with 40 local employees. This year, we’re will distribute 150,000 stoves.

“Burundi doesn’t have a CHW network like neighbouring Rwanda, so we’re training people up to form an equivalent network ready to start distributing in March. We’ve also signed a really exciting partnership with the Red Cross. We will pay people in their volunteer network to be trained and to do the household visits and distributions. There are 400 people already signed up from the Red Cross, but that will grow alongside the CHW network as the project expands.

“This program is called Kibeho Neza, which Burundians will understand as meaning ‘Live Well’.”

As well as Burundi, the company is beginning to roll out a similar program in Gambia, which Ms. Bruges details:

“Gambia is a very small country and the majority of the population are reliant on wood-fuelled fires. We’re starting there initially with 25,000 stoves, which we’re distributing in the Lower River region. This one is very interesting from an environmental perspective because as well as the deforestation from the woodland, families there are also harvesting mangroves to cook with. Mangroves are really important parts of the ecosystem as they lock a lot of carbon. Saving mangrove swamps is going to be very important benefit of what we’re doing in in the country.

“There is also a very different social structure to contend with in Gambia. As I said before, when selecting the stove we try and start with really understanding the women, the reality of their lives, and adapting what we do to work for them. In Gambia, polygamy is the norm. We would normally provide one stove per household, but if you’ve got a household with a number of women living within one household, how do you manage that?

“We also know that in Gambia, unlike Rwanda, people tend to cook rice in one pot and then a stew in a second pot. As a result, we are providing one stove for each wife, so there will be multiple stoves in a household. By providing each of the women in the household with their own stove, they can use two to cook as they would like. That’s just a little example of how we understand local lives and adapt what we do to fit them.”

The New Vanguard

Beyond that, there are other countries on DelAgua’s list where work is in its infancy, including Sierra Leone and Liberia. Having started out as a relatively low-key operation, the company is now making global waves with its incredible hard work. But it hasn’t forgotten its roots in Rwanda, as Ms. Bruges points says in finishing:

“What’s really exciting is that some of our Rwandan team, who have been with us through thick and thin for ten years, are now getting the opportunity to be the vanguard in other countries. For some of them, it’s the first time they’ve ever left the country or flown in a plane. They are going out there with senior roles setting up the logistics of the operation internationally. That’s exciting for us, and it’s exciting for them.”