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DelAgua is the world’s leading carbon project developer in clean cookstoves for rural sub-Saharan Africa . To date, through our Live Well programme we have delivered over 1.5 million stoves changing 7.5 million lives. The Live Well programme is translated and known locally as: Rwanda: Tubeho Neza and Sierra Leone: Livɛ Fyn.
Our focus is on transforming the lives and environment of Africa’s poorest rural communities by providing, free of charge, the best-performing rocket stove along with lifelong integrated education and support. These communities have previously been excluded from clean cooking because of lack of affordability. Carbon financing is enabling the transformation of millions of lives, avoiding CO2 emissions and reducing deforestation. Because our unique free issuance model depends on the production of carbon credits generated by the stoves for funding, the integrity of those credits is of primary importance to us. We attract a range of investors, which provides the financing for the free provision of the stoves. The credits generated are then owned by the investor who has funded those stoves.
We are committed to transparency in every aspect of our project delivery and seek to share project information and insights freely to improve understanding of how we work and show the evidence-based impact this has on the communities we serve. We always welcome field visits to see our team in action and to witness the stoves in daily use.
Project Certifications
From 2012 to 2020 our projects were registered with the UN CER (Certified Emission Reductions). Project registration details here.
From 2020 the projects are registered under VERRA’s voluntary Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) programme issuing Verified Carbon Units (VCUs). Details here: Rwanda, Rwanda 2, Burundi, Sierra Leone, The Gambia.
The VCUs issued are currently in the process of being verified for SD VISta certification. This verifies the project’s impact on eight United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) recorded during the monitoring period.
What Makes DelAgua’s Live Well Programme Different?
Not all carbon credits are equal and not all clean cookstove programmes are equal. We believe that our unique approach delivers greater impact and does more good which means our carbon credits are worth more.
10 Reasons Why:
We provide a fully integrated approach, managed directly by DelAgua. Stove purchase, distribution, education, monitoring and carbon issuance are controlled directly by DelAgua. This gives us 360 visibility on every aspect of the programme.
We specialise in only working with poor rural communities who have previously been denied access to clean cooking because of affordability.
We believe that free issuance, integrated with ongoing education and support, is the only way to tackle dirty cooking effectively at scale and with urgency for the rural poor. Free issues and subsidies have attracted criticism however this is not evidence based and the latest independent CCA (Clean Cooking Alliance) funded report by Duke University 2022 makes this clear. Read the report here.
We supply the optimum performance stove for the communities we serve. We seek the very best technology stove to deliver step- change improvements in health and the environment. Our latest stove is manufactured for us by Burn in Kenya and is the world’s most fuel-efficient stove for household use. Click here for the independently assessed stove performance metrics.
We integrate ongoing education and support. Simply providing a stove is not enough. This means face-to-face household education for every stove recipient and an ongoing support and repair/replace service available to them year-round through our network of local community-based employees. This is core to how we can deliver exceptionally high rates of stove usage and effect long term behaviour change.
We monitor usage of every individual stove. We pioneered the use of technology to match stoves with recipient households, provide precise geo location of each stove and supply thorough ongoing stove tracking. Each household is visited at least every 6 months by our professionally trained and supervised team of Community Health Workers. Cooking habits and stove usage are assessed, with the results uploaded via the DelAgua smartphone app. This means we hold accurate, current data on each of our 1.5 million stoves. Monitoring surveys for audit and carbon issuance are in addition to this and take place every 6 months across a sample of households. We believe we set the benchmark in monitoring good practise when we first began our programme a decade ago and continue to raise the bar today: every visit and every survey is quality assured through the use of verifiable photographic evidence.
That means the confidence we have in our figures and our data is market leading.
We believe in skills transfer and training and hiring local talent to deliver Live Well. We employ over 7,000 staff in Africa. We are providing high quality jobs, the majority in rural areas where employment opportunities are scarce.
We work in partnership with Governments. We believe that success comes from developing effective partnerships with host Governments so that we can understand the country’s clean cooking requirements and precisely target those sectors of the rural population most in need, who do not have access to clean cooking via other initiatives and cannot afford a retail stove.
We have a 10 -year track record in carbon-financed stoves projects and understand the carbon issuance process. We have our own in-house dedicated Carbon Operations team. Contact our team here.
We are a social enterprise. We reinvest our revenue to continue our mission of transforming lives and nature through enterprise.
Find Out More
For further information or to start a conversation on DelAgua’s carbon projects please contact :
Communications Director, Kate Bruges – [email protected]
COO, Euan McDougall – [email protected]
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