Rwanda: Clean and Improved Cooking

Program Currently Inactive

Traditional cookstoves, which burn solid wood fuel for cooking and heating, create dangerous household air pollution. Improved cookstoves offer a solution to the serious health, environmental, and economic impacts. Through results-based carbon finance payments Ci-Dev is supporting Inyenyeri, a local energy utility company in Rwanda, to scale-up an innovative business model that reduces the cost of highly efficient clean cookstoves and makes them accessible to rural communities. 

Ci-Dev will purchase emissions reductions generated from the distribution of efficient cookstoves. These carbon funds will allow Inyenyeri to offer the highly efficient cookstoves with pellets at an affordable price for both rural and urban Rwandans. 

The utility-like model allows customers to only pay for the service received, not the tools to use it. The stoves are leased for free, in return for buying or trading sustainably-harvested and -collected wood for the fuel pellets. The Inyenyeri Fuel+Stove system cuts household air pollution by more than 90 percent, while reducing the amount of wood needed to cook by a similar amount as compared to charcoal. And it costs customers 30 percent less than charcoal. 

The project is an example of how results-based finance can be used to help private sector business unlock capital needed to reach scale.