Photo by: Nora SchÜrhoff
9th November, 2022: Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
Energy and Livelihood for Communities (ELICO) Foundation in partnership with MicroEnergy International, ME SOLshare Ltd, Modern Energy Cooking Services (MECS) and ACCESS Advisory, has launched its participants centred research experiment supporting transition to clean cooking via electricity.
This consultative research, which runs for four months, has been formally launched following intricate preparations with multiple partners from Tanzania, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Germany.
The aim of this research is to gain an understanding of the energy implications at the household level of cooking entirely with electricity and understand complexity and scale of both the opportunities and challenges for modern cooking transition.
“This study will expand our research and enable us to explore the use of multiple devices for cooking in a household, now that the mechanisms for mitigating the upfront costs such as, credit facilities, utilities led financing, carbon finance, cost reduction of devices and results based financing are emerging.” – says Mr. Sisty Basil, the Executive Director of ELICO Foundation
“We seek to generate data on a wider range of devices and how they can be used to meet all household cooking needs. This new data is needed for a range of purposes; for policy making, device supply chain and the carbon credit market.” – says Mr. Basil
Through this study, ELICO will be responsible for data collection, procurement and deployment of cooking appliances, end user training, monitoring and administering all the research questions by using the cooking diary study protocol (International improved cookstove tests focus on the Water Boiling Test (WBT), Controlled Cooking Test (CCT) and the Kitchen Performance Test (KPT)).
About Modern Energy Cooking Services (MECS)
MECS is a seven-year programme funded by UK Aid through the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office. It is a partnership between researchers, innovators, policy makers, and ESMAP drawing on their expertise and relevant work from around the world to co-construct new knowledge with practitioners and the private sector. It is led by LOUGHBOROUGH University, UK. MECS is supporting the transition of low-income economies from biomass to the use of modern energy cooking services (i.e., cooking with electricity or gas). MECS recognizes the need to understand the complexity and scale of both the opportunities and challenges for modern energy cooking transitions in African and Asian contexts.
The Cooking Diaries methodology was developed early in the MECS programme as a means of investigating the compatibility of electric cooking devices with local menus – in terms of what foods can be cooked, energy consumption, and cost (relative to traditional fuels). To date it has focused on each household obtaining and using a single appliance, on the assumption that the upfront cost of multiple appliances would be prohibitive. The focus has tended to be on Electric Pressure Cookers (EPCs), as they offer significant energy savings and appear well suited to most menus, being able to cook a majority of everyday meals. The potential for EPCs playing a role in increasing access to clean cooking is now well recognized. For more information, please visit https://mecs.org.uk/
About MicroEnergy International GmbH
MicroEnergy International (MEI) is a German private consulting organization providing targeted technical assistance and training services to microfinance institutions, clean energy technology providers, policy makers, and entrepreneurs in developing countries. MEI’s mission is to mobilize and support financial, technical and scientific actors to provide households and microenterprises at the Base of the Pyramid with reliable, affordable, and climate-friendly energy solutions. For more information, please visit https://www.microenergy-international.com/
About ME SOLshare Ltd
ME SOLshare Ltd (Solshare) is a leading cleantech company located in the heart of Bangladesh. Solshare provides cutting-edge technology and services and offer scalable solutions. We built our solutions by closely listening to our potential clientele and understanding their expectations with our product. For more information, please visit https://solshare.com/
About ACCESS Advisory
Access Advisory is a non-profit consulting firm whose mission is to improve performance, sustain operations and support growth of rural economic sectors.
Since 2009, ACCESS has worked with financial service providers, rural MSMEs, investors, regulators, NGOs, and other stakeholders to develop and test products and delivery channels that expand financial access to underserved rural farmers and entrepreneurs, and to understand and replicate the aspects of financial service usage that contribute the most to positive outcomes for them. For more information, please visit https://www.accessadvisory.org/meet-the-team/
About ELICO Foundation
ELICO is a non-profit organization established in Tanzania (reg. no.00NGO/R/0218) with the main goal of accelerating access to modern energy and energy services for socio-economic development of rural and last mile areas in Africa. Most of our current interventions are solar based and are being co-developed with the user communities. They include solar-powered water pumping for irrigation by rural smallholder farmers, solar-powered refrigeration for fresh produce by smallholder farmers and artisanal fisher communities, green mini-grids with a focus on productive uses, solar microgrid for remote health facilities with a focus on powering laboratory equipment’s and refrigerator for vaccines storage and other lifesaving medicines and other solar related productive uses of renewable energy such as rice milling as well as pottery wheels, ELICO recognizes that until and unless we avail energy for productive uses in rural Tanzania, the level of prosperity in the country will remain limited. We are clear that we must deliver Sustainable Energy for all Tanzanians, more rapidly for those living in rural areas where poverty incidence is highest. For more information, please visit www.elicofoundation.org
Contact details
For questions or more details please contact:
Sisty Basil, Executive Director of ELICO Foundation
Mobile: +255 787 252585
E: Sisty.Basil@elicofoundation.org
