Clean Cooking Alliance Announces 2022 Clean Cooking Women Leaders of the Year
The Clean Cooking Alliance (CCA) has announced the winners of the 2022 Clean Cooking Women Leaders Award as: Rejoice Ntiriwaa, Researcher/Teacher at Cape Coast Technical University; Kalinda Magloire, Co-founder and CEO of SWITCH; and Patience Alifo, Co-founder of EcoNexus Venture.
In previous years, the award was named ‘Women Entrepreneur of the Year.’ In recognition of the range of women’s leadership across the entire clean cooking ecosystem, the new award recognizes these three individuals advancing clean cooking solutions through: policy, advocacy, and research; business leadership and entrepreneurship; and youth leadership.
“Accelerating access to clean cooking is a critical tool for empowering women and advancing gender equality, and it is women who make this happen, every day, feeding their families, working in sales, designing stoves women want to use, running leadership teams, implementing policy – all of it,” said Dymphna van der Lans, CEO, Clean Cooking Alliance. “As these three women demonstrate through their passion, vision and tenacity, the clean cooking sector presents opportunities for women to make their mark in a growing market and drive real progress.”
CCA will present Ntiriwaa, Magloire and Alifo with the 2022 Clean Cooking Women Leaders Award at the Clean Cooking Forum 2022, to be held on October 11-13 in Accra, Ghana. CCA also proudly acknowledges the ongoing work and leadership of the many women leaders in the clean cooking sector, as well as those working toward energy access for all.
Rejoice Ntiriwaa, Researcher/Teacher at Cape Coast Technical University from Ghana
(Policy, Advocacy, and Research winner)
Rejoice Ntiriwaa is a researcher and lecturer at Cape Coast Technical University, who teaches university students about bioenergy resources, renewable energy systems design, and alternate energy sources. Her research interests extend beyond the development of new cooking fuels from waste materials to the safety of human lives and the environment.
Ntirwaa utilizes the quality function deployment strategy to involve the end users in the engineering solutions that are under consideration in her current research. In addition to actively promoting the acceptance and usage of modern energy cooking techniques in front of her students, she regularly visits women in small-scale food processing enterprises to educate them on the importance of switching from dirty cooking energies to clean choices. Her advocacy has reached approximately 756 women in the Eastern, Central, and Northern Regions of Ghana, coupled with her active campaigning to raise awareness on social media.
Kalinda Magloire, Co-founder and CEO of SWITCH from Haiti
(Business Leadership and Entrepreneurship winner)
Kalinda Magloire is an international development practitioner with almost 20 years of experience managing capacity building, governance projects and post-disaster response in Haiti. In 2012, Magloire founded SWITCH SA, the first clean cooking women-led enterprise in Haiti. In 10 years, Magloire and her team were able to convert a range of customers from charcoal to LPG cooking: 2,680 families, 415 schools and 982 food street vendors; and introduced one of the first programs in the world to finance clean cooking through remittances.
Believing that women are at the forefront of the fight for clean cooking, Magloire decided that SWITCH should have women empowerment at all levels in its mission. She favored the recruitment and training of women in the technical roles of the company, in sectors traditionally reserved for men in Haiti.
Patience Alifo, Co-founder of EcoNexus Venture from Ghana
(Youth Leadership winner)
Patience Alifo, a 26-year-old entrepreneur from Ghana, is an experienced innovator with a demonstrated history of working in the environmental services industry. She co-founded EcoNexus Ventures Limited (ENVLTD), a Ghanaian-based biotechnology social enterprise commercializing sustainable biofuel and waste-to-energy production in Africa.
Alifo and her team have launched their innovative clean cooking fuel, Ecogel in four cities in Ghana with over 350 active users, and have sold about 720,000 liters of Ecogel fuels, 1,500 stoves, and have signed about 25 sales agents, known as Green Energy Entrepreneurs. The team’s next step is to introduce to the market their innovative swap-and-go on-demand canned pressurized bioethanol vapor fuels that give users an enhanced experience, using AI and machine learning platforms for users to comfortably order fuel refills in a swap-and-go manner.
At the age of 19, Alifo founded Greenfuel Innovation Africa to minimize the use of wood fuel in Ghana by providing access to affordable and clean coconut waste charcoal briquette. She was selected among the 10 finalists of the McDan Entrepreneurship challenge and won a grant of $5,000 to promote her innovative clean coconut waste charcoal briquette in Ghana.
