Today we are excited to be able to offer the opportunity to buy Live Well carbon credits direct from us at DelAgua. We launched the Live Well programme over a decade ago with the aim of bringing clean cooking to rural communities across Africa. These families have been dependent on wood fuelled open fires which have a devastating impact on their health and the environment.
The human cost is enormous: chronic lung disease caused by smoke inhalation, malnutrition, burns, gruelling hours spent daily hunting for wood so women have no time for more productive activities and children miss school, the threat of violence against girls as they travel far from their villages in the search for scarce wood. The environmental cost is equally high: cooking on open fire is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and woodfuel use has led to deforestation on a huge scale and the loss of wildlife habitats such as that of the Mountain Gorillas in Rwanda.
The poverty of rural households in Least Developed Countries has meant they have been excluded from access to clean cooking because they cannot afford even a fraction of the price of a stove. We pioneered using carbon financing to provide the funding so that these families can receive, free, a top quality energy efficient stove which cuts wood use by 71% , together with the proper education and support that means cooking habits change and families understand all the benefits of using the stove.
Live Well is delivered by local staff including a network of over 7,000 community-based workers. This is providing large scale, valuable, skilled employment in regions where such opportunities are scarce.
The Live Well programme is financed solely by the sale of carbon credits. Purchasing Live Well carbon credits allows individuals and companies to offset their carbon footprint at the same time as providing funding for more stoves which transform lives and nature.
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.
Live Well is transforming the health and wellbeing of rural communities in Rwanda, The Gambia and Sierra Leone. So far we have provided over 1.5 million stoves changing 7.5 million lives, but the challenge to tackle dirty cooking is enormous, with over 2 billion people still dependent on polluting, inefficient fires. Buying Live Well credits from us means we can accelerate our efforts in combatting this health and environmental crisis.
Our credits are registered under VERRA’s Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) programme, the world’s largest greenhouse gas crediting programme. This means you can have confidence that for every 1 credit you purchase, 1 tonne of CO2 emissions has been avoided, alongside providing multiple health and environmental benefits.
By buying carbon credits directly from DelAgua you are ensuring that the credits you purchase are retired and all your money goes directly to supporting Live Well, providing lifechanging stoves and education to the poorest rural communities across Africa.
You can read more about our project benefits here or see the impact a cookstove has on families here. Join the Live Well community and receive 10% discount on your first purchase, just add the code LIVEWELL10 to the coupon box when you checkout.
Over the next fortnight follow us as we share daily stories from families using our Live Well stoves.
