Alliance awards capacity building support to strengthen fuel enterprises
The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves has announced the recipients of the Fuel Enterprise Capacity Building Opportunity, which will support 3 enterprises producing and distributing improved fuels in Kenya, Rwanda, India and Bhutan.
Designed to focus on efficient biomass fuel supply chains, this support will help fuel enterprises strengthen their business models and overcome market barriers to scale, while also better enabling enterprises to engage more effectively with governments and investors to increase support for efficient and cleaner burning fuels. It will also increase access to cleaner fuels for local populations to use for their household energy needs, reducing the devastating health, gender, livelihood, and environmental impacts resulting from cooking over open fires and traditional cookstoves that burn solid and unprocessed biomass.
The capacity building support, provided by Alliance partner ENEA Consulting, will include in-country site visits to evaluate and analyze the recipients’ fuel value chains, identify fuel production and distribution potential, and highlight ways to optimize strategic targets and production methods in a sustainable way through a targeted life cycle assessment of their value chain.
The recipients of the support include:
- Inyenyeri – provides locally collected and produced, sustainable biomass fuel pellets and gasifier stoves to rural and urban Rwandan households.
- Leocome – centered around integrated sugar production, Leocome utilizes by-products from a local sugar company to produce and sell ethanol fuel and stoves.
- Dazin – works with rural households in Bhutan with expansion to India, to provide wood waste in exchange for free fuel cookies and leased stoves.
As part of this overall effort, a framework documenting the capacity building approach specific to fuel enterprises will be developed and disseminated so that others can use the information to strengthen their fuel production and distribution models.
Previous Alliance fuel grantees have also received this support as a component of Alliance grant opportunities and have utilized the results to improve fuel business models ranging from briquettes in Cambodia, to pellets in Kenya, to biogas in Uganda, and ethanol in Nigeria. This is the first time the Alliance has provided this support as a stand-alone opportunity for fuel enterprises.