DelAgua Attends Energy Private Developers - Energy Week Conference

Energy Private Developers organized the 4th Energy Week conference under the theme “Accelerating Rwanda’s Renewable Energy Transition and Adoption”. Energy Private Developers works with government, industry leaders, development partners and other stakeholders to advocate for policies and promote sustainable energy practices and investments.

DelAgua’s Rwanda Country Director, Monica Keza, participated in the conference and spoke on a panel discussing “Cooking Up Solutions: Enhancing stakeholders Collaborative Efforts to Ensure Universal Access to Clean Cooking for All”

During the panel discussions, Monica highlighted the key factors that have contributed to the success of our Live Well programme, which has distributed more than 1.5 million improved cook stoves across 27 districts in Rwanda.

  1. Quality stove: In order to address the lack of access to clean cooking, the most important aspect is availing a top-quality high-performance stove that works for the women and the reality of their lives. Our stove is manufactured by BURN in Kenya and reduces firewood use by 71%. Lower quality, cheaper or brick built stoves will not deliver the performance change that families need and value.
  2. Long-term behaviour change: Our programme emphasizes education to beneficiary households. We conduct household visits to educate beneficiaries on the benefits of clean cooking. No other project does this level of follow up – 2/3 of our costs go to this aspect of our programme.
  3. Government Relations: We collaborate with governments to target rural households without access to clean cooking. Additionally, we engage leaders at every level – from Ministries to stakeholder consultations with district mayors, sector leaders & CHWs. These leaders have social influence in the communities and this drives adoption of the stoves and clean cooking message. This partnership has made it possible for DelAgua to secure Letters of Authorization from GoR to support the carbon operations part of the programme.
  4. Integrity: This is a crucial aspect of ensuring that we deliver an impactful programme & generate quality carbon credits. Our programme model allows us to track each stove, its usage & educates all beneficiaries on the benefits of clean cooking and follow up household visits throughout the stove’s lifespan of 10 years. This means that we are able to capture accurate data used for project verification.
  5. Measurable impact: Exclusive focus on free distribution to rural communities where Improved Cook Stoves are unaffordable, delivers tangible health, economic and environmental benefits across several SDGs. To date, we have distributed over 1.5million stoves in Rwanda and this has improved the lives of more than 6 million people.
  6. Local Expertise: Our country operations hire and train locals to deliver the programme. This is particularly important because it allows us to tailor the programme to the communities. Over the years, we have worked with more than 7,000 Community Health Workers and 200 full time staff in Rwanda.

Watch Monica Keza during the panel “Cooking Up Solutions: Enhancing stakeholders Collaborative Efforts to Ensure Universal Access to Clean Cooking for All” below: