Rwanda : Environmental friendly cooking stoves introduced in Rwanda

Every year in Rwanda 8,100 people die because of indoor air pollution in smoky kitchens and 2 million die globally according to the 2008 world Health report, this was revealed in the conference of carbon stakeholder’s consultation that was organized by energy and impact carbon projects.
More than 95 percent of Rwandese population prepares food using primitive stoves fueled by wood or charcoal and this mostly affects women than men.
Women who fall under this issue often walk 10 kilo meters and spend 30 hours per week collecting fire woods, while families can spend over 3 percent of their annual income on wood or charcoal.
“We initiated the improved biomass stoves in the Western Rwanda, starting in the Karongi District and further expansion thereafter to include all areas of Rwanda”. Erik Wurster, the Managing Director of UpEnergy Rwanda, says
He added that the program has already opened active projects in Uganda, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Mexico and Guatemala.
Wurster, emphasized that Programs in Ghana, Mali, Uganda and Tanzania have sold some 500,000 clean stoves Due to a lack of customer access to affordable, clean, and efficient technologies.
Up Energy will partner with multiple local manufacturers, assemblers and distributors to enable scale of distributed channels and has initially partnered with One Acre Fund Rwanda (Tubura) in Western Rwanda.
It was highlighted that cleaner products exist that slash fuel consumption by up to 60% and deadly pollution over 80 percent, but these solutions are unaffordable to target customers and challenging infrastructure poor settings.

Up Energy addresses these barriers by leveraging carbon finance to build distribution channels that sell household energy products at affordable price ranging from 12 to 15 USD of which they expect it to be cheaper for the local people.
The Rwanda Environment Management Authority indicates that in 1993 forests covered 26 percent of Rwanda’s land area, while by 2004 it only covered 19 percent. This shows a decrease of 17 percent of forest area in 11 years.
Rwanda is facing a huge deficit in term of annual demand for fuel wood and sustainable production potential. According to current situation shows a deficit of 9,553,000 cubic meters of wood in 2009.
http://rwandaenergy.com/2012/05/rwanda-environmental-friendly-cooking-stoves-introduced-rwanda/