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Women in Senegal to benefit from new opportunities in the energy market

SEM Fund and GVEP International are joining forces to increase women’s participation in the energy market in Senegal and make sustainable energy available to the poorest communities.

Over the next three years, 250 women-run micro and small enterprises in eastern Senegal will receive tailored mentoring, business and financial support to expand access to energy products and services, and to increase their productivity.

Rural communities in the regions of Tambacounda and Kedougou suffer from low access to energy – 9% and 4% respectively – as well as chronic poverty and unemployment. Dependence on solid fuel for cooking is high (89%) – while penetration of improved cookstoves remains low (less than 4%).

Women and girls are disproportionately affected by energy poverty as they spend several hours a day collecting firewood, cook on inefficient and smoky cookstoves – which kill about 6,300 Senegalese each year, according to WHO (2009) and rely on poor lighting for their house chores.

Women in the Tambacounda and Kedougou regions derive most of their income from agricultural crop processing and transformation activities.

Increasing energy access offers new economic opportunities for women, both via productive use of energy applied to the processing of rice, sorghum, millet, maize, cotton, baobab fruit and honey, and via the sale of energy products and services.

This will not only contribute to women’s economic empowerment but also have a considerable impact on their estimated 4,500 family members, who will benefit from the extra income. More significantly it will provide 400,000 women, men and children with improved access to clean energy, including small local trade businesses such as shopkeepers, retail outlets and smallholders.

However, women entrepreneurs face multiple barriers in participating in the energy market:

lack of skills, training and educational opportunities;

lack of access to finance given that most of the collateral assets required by banks are controlled by men;

lack of awareness of energy as a service and as a business opportunity in the rural market;

lack of authority within the family and community, coupled with prejudice about gender roles from male suppliers or distributors.

Addressing these barriers requires a systematic and integrated approach to improving women’s position along the value-chain.

GVEP and SEM Fund will work together with various actors at a local and national level to break down those barriers and challenge stereotypes.

250 women will be recruited from communities in the regions of Tambacounda and Kedougou. Age will not be a restriction: both young and mature women are welcome to apply. The selection criteria will instead focus on their entrepreneurial spirit, enthusiasm to create a sustainable business and ability to influence and act as a positive role model within the community.

“By supporting women-run enterprises in expanding their linkages with financing institutions, markets and products, we are supporting a holistic system that will bring clean energy one step closer to those who need them most” explains Sire A. Diallo, Executive Director of SEM Fund.

“Men will also have an important role to play”, explains Leah Kaguara, Programme Director at GVEP International. “Through the active involvement of male opinion leaders in gender sensitisation activities, we hope to create an environment where families and communities support women entrepreneurs in their growth”.

The project is partly funded by ENERGIA, the International Network on Gender and Sustainable Energy.

The Courier among the Knights

Have you ever found yourself trapped in the relentless jaws that are ‘Zambian rush hour’? If so, you’ll certainly agree with my following analogy; if each car were to be a knight and each road to be a path within its castle, rush hour would be an army taking siege upon that very castle. Under the circumstance of the siege, the knights (the cars), although gridlocked and confined to the walls of their castle (the city), all scamper around frantically for the commotion: boystrously cutting in front of one another, impatiently shouting at one other, and yet, most frustratingly, seeming to get nowhere fast. The castle (the city), quite simply, has not been built for this kind of sudden and adrenaline-fuelled movement. Whether the castle be likened to the city of Chipata, Lusaka or Kabwe, it is a castle in lack of sufficiently developed infrastructure to allow the fluid movement of its knights (the cars), particularly in times of great commotion. Amongst all of these Knights, a courier can be found, this is us, VITALITE Zambia. This particular courier, has the objective of distributing all of its products around the entire castle, so that it can reach all of those who need them. However, due to the poor infrastructure of the castle, it is clear that a more innovative approach must be taken in their delivery.

Chipata, the Eastern Capital, is home to a large fleet of bicycle taxis. It was not long before our amazing crew at the Chipata branch saw, via observaing this trade, a clear and fortuitous, alternative distribution method. If you like, instead of us, the “courier of the castle”, moving around just like all the other “knights of the castle”, in cars, we are going to move by bicycle, perhaps the equivalent of a “messenger bird” in my analogy. We will be swift, elegant and efficient. This novel project has, in fact, already started to be put to the test. We are using bicycle couriers to transport our products to VITALITE re-sellers that are located in and around Chipata. They are also being used to give out flyers and marketing material to our customers. We soon plan to replicate this model and integrate it into our operations in Katete, Kabwe and other cities and towns across Zambia.

Using this kind of new product delivery system we are keeping our carbon footprint at zero. If one were to extend the running analogy even further, the unnecessarily large amount of energy used by the knights, when futilely scurrying around, could be directly compared to the wasteful fuel consumption of the cars, when caught in a traffic jam. Chipata, in particular, has in recent years seen an explosion in the number of cars on its narrow roads, which has lead to even greater congestion and pollution.

At VITALITE, our long term aim has always been, and will always be, to help give people guidance towards and an opportunity for a more prosperous future, by enabling them to achieve their full potential. It is because of this that in the process of delivering our products we have been very conscious of our impact on the surrounding human and physical environment, two things that all of our employees are very committed to improving. In further correspondance with our aim, we are proactively trying to distribute our products to everyone, not just those which are most easily accessible. We hope by this small contribution, we can play a part in limiting the congestion of the street and reducing the levels of harmful car pollutants. Many of our products are in fact aimed at reducing expsoure to such pollutants, in order to protect people, particularly women and children, from resulting respiratory diseases.

Through our new delivery system WE have come one step closer to our long term aim;

And, in doing so, THOUSANDS have come one step closer to achieving their full potential.

by Campbell Donnelly

#couriers #globaldev #distribution #zambia #bicycle #carbon #footprint #energy

Old habits are hard to break

We have been distributing our stoves for over two months now. As we are a small grassroots organization with limited resources and personnel, we don't yet have numbers in the millions or even thousands to boast. We have distributed just over 400 of our improved cookstoves. This might not necessarily sound like a lot, but for what goes into the preparation, organization, follow-up, and actual delivery of each stove, it's an enormous number.

The kind of stove we're introducing in Senegal has never been seen here before. We're asking women not only to adopt a new technology that's foreign to them, but we're also asking them to buy and sell this technology. There's been a lot of recent discussion about "behavior change" and how its perhaps the most difficult yet crucial aspect of development work. Old habits are hard to break. If women are accustomed to cooking with a certain kind of stove and with a certain kind of fuel, they're not just going to abandon their habits without a fight. That's why the team at SEM spent over a year working with various women's groups throughout the greater Dakar area to come up with a design that was the most popular and appealing to the individuals that cook on a daily basis.

As time progressed, SEM Fund and the women's groups were able to get to know each other better and establish relationships based on trust. We expand on this trust with our frequent site visits and demonstrations. It is thanks to this trust that we are able to distribute our stoves today to women's groups in hopes that they will be able to pay off the stoves in a series of small monthly installments as opposed to paying the full price upfront. Our stoves are made of stainless steel and they are imported from halfway around the world. For these reasons we cannot sell the stoves as cheaply as some of the other models in Senegal. However because we can trust that the women in charge of our stoves will make a strong effort to see that monthly payments for the stoves are collected and returned, we know we can count on them to cover the full cost of the stoves over time. The women trust that the stoves we are delivering to them really are as fuel efficient, cost effective, and good for the environment as we say they are.

When we say over 400 stoves have been distributed, that means we have convinced over 400 women to forgo their old habits, invest their limited capital, and try a new stove. If they didn't trust us in the first place this would be impossible to accomplish.

by David Lothamer

#cookstoves #trust #habits #development #gender #women

Food, people, food!

I just love food. I’m Italian, thank you very much. And, to me, that’s always been one of the main interesting points about Senegal: its sophisticated food culture. In Senegal, it is not rare at all to randomly hear people talk about how amazing their own food is. They are extremely proud of it.

What the vast majority of people do not realize is that, behind that tasty fabulousness, there’s a dark secret about the way Senegalese food is cooked- charcoal. That evil stuff is pretty much everywhere and widely used in kitchens all over the country.

Everything about charcoal is dirty. Every year, 40,000 hectares of forest are destroyed in Senegal just for charcoal production. It is estimated that, in order to make one Kg of charcoal, six Kg of wood are required because the process of making charcoal is extremely inefficient. More precisely, charcoal kilns are only 17% efficient and most of the energy is dissipated through combustion.

More devastatingly, old Senegalese people will tell stories of how green the country was just over 40 years ago. They will reminiscence their country’s beautiful forests, which once stretched from St. Louis in the North all the way down to the lush Southern region of the Casamance. Today, the North is essentially a semi-desert and forests have been cut back to small pockets of protected areas with lapsed protection enforcement measures. Today, forests are as far South as 400 Km from Dakar. And still shrinking rapidly.

Senegalese authorities claim the use of woodfuel (charcoal and wood) is the main cause of deforestation in Senegal. I tend to disagree. While it’s true that forests are being destroyed for the procurement of fuel for cooking, it is not the use of firewood per se that is the problem. I think it is the utter lack of forest sustainable management systems that is the real plague.

Through our programme, the Dakar Sustainable Energy Programme, not only do we offer efficient cook stoves to Senegalese households but we also provide sustainable biomass (wood in other words) to them to replace charcoal. Our biomass comes from sustainably-managed forest plantations, the so-called “Bande de Filao”, or Filao Strip, for all of you, the non-francophones….

The species (Filao) – also known to us, the geeks, as Casuarina Equisetifolia- is a very powerful, clean woody fuel and was artificially planted in Senegal at the beginning of the 80s to create a wind wall on the country’s Northern coast in order to prevent dune advancement onto adjacent agricultural land.

The “Bande de Filao” sustainable management system allows us to make sure that trees are re-replaced when cut and that strict reforestation follow-up activities are implemented actually implemented by the Authorities. More importantly, as it is a plantation that was created on what was essentially sand, there is really very little negative impact on biodiversity when the plantation is harvested and carbon stocks diminish only temporarily. As it stands today, the Bande de Filao is majestic.

Who said that beautiful things in life (food, people, food!) only come at a cost, again?

by Matteo Bigoni

#food #people #environment #charcoal #stoves #cooking

Positive Energy

Recently, SEM, Shared Value Africa Zambia and The Differ Group have been working together to develop a common brand that one day we hope will be associated all over Africa with POSITIVE ENERGY. The common brand is called VITALITE (all CAPS), and its aim is to offer reliable, clean and affordable energy products to low-income, energy-poor households. One definition of vitality is “the state of being strong and active; energy”, we like that underlying definition for this brand. It hints at precisely what we are all about. Allow me to break that down.

STRONG – when you are sick, you are not strong. VITALITE’s products are designed to reduce indoor air pollution as compared to traditional cooking and lighting methods that are making far too many people sick.

ACTIVE – PROactive = developmental gains, INactive = dependency. VITALITE represents a market-based approach that provides a opportunity, not a hand-out, for proactive people to reduce the poverty tax afflicting their energy access – however to take advantage of this opportunity our customers must be active, willing to change the status quo and adopt new ways of doing things.

ENERGY – everyone should have the opportunity to reach their full potential. Full Stop! Positive energy is necessary to make that possible. You can’t reach your full potential if you don’t have safe or reliable lighting at night to be productive – for example to study or work. You can’t reach your full potential if you have no option but to crush your immune system when cooking your food by inhaling, on a daily basis, carbon monoxide at multiples of what the World Health Organization classifies as safe. You can’t reach your potential if over 30% of your household income must go towards paying for charcoal and kerosene. Our community, cities, countries and world can’t reach their collective potential if our forests are turned into charcoal (case in point – Haiti).

VITALITE aims to provide alternatives for the energy-poor to access some positive energy!

by John Fay

#positive #energy #strong #active #access #communities

Africa-EU Energy Partnership

Siré and I are off to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for Second High Level Meeting of the Africa-EU Energy Partnership (AEEP) from 11-13 Feb 2014 in Addis Ababa. Many thanks to the conference organizers for extending an invitation to us! You can check out more info about the event at www.aeep-conference.org.

We will have a booth displaying our VITALITE line of products. If you are attending the conference please come by and say hello, for those that aren’t attending, we’ll be sure to let you know how it goes!

by John Fay

#aeep conference #africa #eu #energy #partnership #vitalite

And the lights go off...

Yesterday evening, my entire neighbourhood went dark. The lights of my apartment, and of all of those in sight, went off. The Monument de la Renaissance stood in the darkness, with none of its customary lights shining through the night.

I was right in the middle of cooking dinner and I couldn't see what I was chopping, it could have been a carrot or my finger. I quickly grabbed my solar light, positioned it next to me and went on with what I was doing.

The lights were off for nearly two hours. It was the longest power cut we'd had in two months and we just hopped it would come back eventually.

Everyone in the world experiences power cuts at some point or another. But for 1.3 billion people, there is nothing to cut. They simply do not have electricity in their homes. Ever. Imagine spending your evenings in the dark, trying to cook with a small candle, or reading through the light of a torch. Imagine going through your school years without the ability to do your homework after dark. Imagine trying to go through your day knowing that everything you need to do must be done when the sun is still out.

To light your home you would use the cheapest and most accessible form of lighting. This could be candles, kerosene lights or battery-powered torches. Imagine having to turn those on one by one when the sun went down. Imagine the strain it would place on your economies and on your health.

There's a long, unpaved road ahead before each and everyone of those 1.3 billion people will be complaining about power cuts, instead of lack of power. But in the meantime, sustainable, durable and cheap solutions exist.

Majority of these people live in the southern hemisphere, in countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. They live in places known for how sunny they are. By harnessing energy that is readily available to them during the day, they can now cook without chopping any of their fingers off, and study throughout the night for that upcoming test.

They can now live their lives as if the sun didn't go down.

by Constanza Robles

#solar #Solarlight #africa #southasia #electricity #power #energy

Our Demos are… HOT

Yes, I said it! Our demos are HOT (Hands-On-Training). By holding several stove demonstrations per week, we are removing several barriers to access at once. Though appropriate technologies exist their uptake has not met expectations due to several barriers in the distribution chain. For instance, due to the lack of awareness and information many women are reluctant or choose not to adopt an efficient cookstove. These stoves are reaching great technological heights, which make cooking less of a death sentence for millions of women and children. However, the target market needs to have a certain level of comfort with the technology before making a decision to spend what could be a “hefty sum” for them on it.

Moreover, to increase the awareness for clean cooking technologies for the base of the pyramid markets it is necessary to go off the beaten path when it comes to marketing. Websites, brochures, and elaborated TV ads are not necessarily the best way to get the message across to a demographic that is often times illiterate.

Hence our demos close the gap in distribution by providing a hands-on training on how to use the stove in the local language. They give a firsthand experience to the potential end-users, where many of them are able to touch, feel and see the stove in action live. The women interact with our demonstration staff in a way that TV, radio, or website do not.

The women can say to us “This stove works nicely but it certainly we’ll be too expensive for us.” We can respond on the spot saying, “no, you are able to take a stove with you right now against a deposit and then make small payments until it is paid in full.” This also removes one the biggest obstacles to access.

For the market to reach the last mile, a combination of for-profit and non-profit strategies is necessary. We do the legwork to secure the right financing mechanism through partnerships. The women participate in all activities of our distribution chain from identifying the right technology to selling it in their communities so that the product is closer to the customer.

Now don’t think like me that our demos are HOT?

by Sire A. Diallo

#energy #globaldev #traiing #nonprofit #cookstoves #gender

I am a sucker for lunch boxes. I don’t know who came up with them. But the simple fact that you can make your lunch, stick it in a lunch box, carry out around and then eat as if it was fresh, is incredible. It’s a simple yet practical technology.

That’s what our EcoSacs are: a simple yet practical technology. In short, our EcoSacs are heat-retention bags, which means that you can cook a meal and if people show up an hour late, the food will still be warm and ready to eat. No reheating and, most importantly, no energy waste.

Whenever we go and present our eco-products throughout Dakar, the women remain in awe by the EcoSac. You boil the water, cook the rice for 10 minutes, and leave the rest of the cooking to the EcoSac, saving both time and fuel. Once the sauce is ready, you pull out the rice and eat. Simple as that. The EcoSac not only keeps the rice warm while you cook the rest of your meals, it can also be used to keep food cold.

Simply yet practical technologies that make life that little bit easier.

#ecosac #energy #globaldev #gender #technology

"Cuisiner, un acte quotidien, peut être est une menace pour la santé publique, le développement économique et même l’environnement.

L’information peut prêter à sourire, mais pourtant des spécialistes en conférence de presse, ont révélé aux médias des chiffres effarants confirmant cette annonce."

"Cooking, a daily activity, can be a risk for global health, economic development, and even the environment.

This information might be shocking, but it is what experts revealed at a press conference which unveiled the shocking data"

Article on dakaractu.com on our press conference

Peter Singer, CEO of Grand Challenges Canada, funded by the government of Canada, expressed his support for SEM Fund's clean cook stove project. "Grand Chall...

#grand challeges canada #cleancookstoves

Communications in Providing Access to Energy

On Thursday 19th of December we held a press conference to raise awareness about the issue of indoor air pollution. One of the journalists asked "what is the role of communications in this project?"

That might be the perennial questions in communications: Why are you making this effort to let people know about it? Why do people even need to know about it?

And I'm going to answer that questions with another question: How many times have you bought something you never heard about before? Word-of-mouth, in its expanded form, continues to be the strongest way to get people involved, and consequently the most likely way to make an impact.

Even though SEM Fund doesn't do it for a profit, as an organisation, we sell products.They're actually products that low-income families need, and they're beneficial in a number of ways. But if people don't buy them, then there's no point to it.

So that's the role of communications in our project. We use basic communication tools (like this blog, or the local media) to raise awareness about the issue and about our solution. We explain the societal, economic and health impacts of current products (unclean cookstoves, kerosene lights), and we provide an alternative. If people know about an issue, they're going to be less skeptical when you try to sell them a clean stove.

Every time I hear people talking about an issue or a campaign, I want to personally praise their communications and marketing managers. Because regardless of how good your campaign, project, organisations is, if you don't bring attention to it, no one is going to hear or care about it.

Pictures of our recent press conference on indoor air pollution. 28 representatives from national and local media attended to learn more about indoor air pollution.

Our goal is to ensure energy poverty and technology injustice are things of the past in 200 villages by and 20 peri-urban centers by 2015

Sire Diallo, Executive Director

#energy #sustainability #technology #poverty

Our Hero: Marie Sarr

Marie Sarr lives and works for a community organisation in Maleka. She’s been helping out members of the community for years and was excited to be a part of the project.

After buying the stove, she said that cooking on them really easy. But not only that, she thought they were also necessary considering the rise price of charcoal. She said that “everyone knows that gas fuel today is expensive. The sac of biomass is only 1800CFA and it can provide fuel for a large or small family for 15 days. I myself was one of the first users and I can tell you that it’s very beneficial!”

She also bought the bought an EcoSac and thanks to it she can now cook lunch for her children and the food will stay warm regardless of what time they come home. Not having to reheat food means that she can now save time and fuel.

Her dedication to her community have made her our Hero this week. When we finished chatting to her, she said “We are together as a team, ca Kaw ca kanam rek!!” , which in Wolof means progress toward the future! We couldn’t agree more.

#sustainability #hero #ecostove #ecosac #senegal #communities

A demonstration at Thiaroye Kao, Dakar to show how the EcoSac, Prime Stove and solar lights work

#sustainability #women #community #solar lights #senegal #stove

Our Hero: Adiaratou Diallo

Adiaratou Diallo lives in Thiaroye Kao with around 18 family members. Because of the number of people she has to cook for on a daily basis, fuel has become an increasing strain on her economies.

She told us she was very happy with the stove. “I’ve already seen how economical it is because of the kind of firewood it uses. Today a kilo of charcoal costs 250 cfa. That’s too expensive for women plus one kilo of charcoal is not enough to finish a meal. »

When we asked her whether she would recommend the stove to other women, she said that « when we finish the meeting here today people will be coming to me to ask about the stoves. When we receive them we’ll get right to work because women here are exhausted [with the charcoal shortages]. Even on Tabaski there was one. I had to send people out to find it and the price was 250 cfa per kilo. Once the stoves and firewood are available to us we’ll get started immediately. Everyone will have their own and use it. »

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