Focus Media (Kigali)
Rodrigue Rwirahira
26 March 2009
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Imagine a warehouse which covers the area of a football pitch, and which is a 100 meters high. This is a gigantic structure that would dwarf for instance the Ecobank building in Kigali city center. Now imagine 11 of such warehouses, and think about the quantity of wood required to completely fill all of them; now you have an idea of the annual consumption of fuel for cooking by Rwandan families.
Indeed, every year some 5.5 million m3 of wood is used in Rwanda for domestic cooking and heating (including schools and prisons), which represents 90% of all firewood consumed in the country. Industrial use (tea and sugar factories, restaurants, bakeries) is much lower, at some 155,550 m3 per year.
Although the problem has been around for decades, today the vast majority of Rwandans still uses wood fuel (often in the form of charcoal) for cooking. It is clear that this level of consumption is unsustainable, even with reafforestation. All the more so since, considering the population growth, the eleven warehouses will quickly become a score. Before long, no tree will be left standing.
The solution is evident: reducing the quantity of wood consumed. Which is exactly what the government is trying to do; according to Yusuf Uwamahoro, the energy sector coordinator in the ministry of infrastructure, the target for 2020 is to reduce the volume of wood consumed by 50%, through efficient use of biomass and alternative sources of fuel.
The first option is, in the context of Rwanda, the most obvious, given that the stoves commonly used are highly wasteful. Therefore, the Center for Innovation and Technology Transfer (CITT) at KIST was tasked several years ago with developing more efficient cookers, which resulted in different wood stoves which all use only half or less of the fuel consumed by traditional ones.
"We produce a range of fuel-saving stoves that can meet everyone's financial capacity," says Jean Nepo Mutsinzi, a field engineer in CITT. "We have square and round ones, made either from clay, cement or metal. We want to promote these products because they save energy and are cheaper than charcoal."
CITT's mission is to promote the stoves and disseminate the technology, not mass production. It organizes training in the manufacturing of the cooking devices; in 2008 the center initiated 441 trainers in several districts of southern province including Huye, Gisagara, Nyamagabe and Nyaruguru.
"This year, we are planning to train 661 instructors countrywide who will manage to reach some 120,000 households," Mutsinzi explains.
Sensitization on more efficient use of wood will mainly target the rural areas, says Yusuf Uwamahoro of the infrastructure ministry. It will be accompanied by dissemination of improved carbonization methods to make charcoal.
Waiving taxes on LPG
Apart from more efficient consumption, the ministry is also exploring substitutes for wood-peat, kerosene, liquid petroleum gas (LPG), alternative fuel blocks and papyrus, amongst others.
"We have a big quantity of peat in our swamps which is not being used," Uwamahoro explains. "So we have set up a program in collaboration with Finnish experts for its extraction and improved carbonization, which should result in good quality fuel. So far peat has been used to some extent by big institutions, prisons and schools, but we want to make it more widely available and easily accessible for the whole community."
In urban areas, the government wants to encourage the use of LPG. Currently, this is not obvious because high taxes make gas expensive, which is why the government is considering a waiver to make LPG a more interesting option.
Another initiative of the ministry of infrastructure is the National Domestic Biomass Program to generate energy from animal excrement. Under the program, people mainly in rural areas will be taught how to generate energy from dung either for cooking or lighting houses.
High cost
The government is not alone in its quest to save Rwanda's trees. Several private initiatives have sprung up to propose alternatives or more efficient fuel use. In Nyakabanda and Kimisagara, for instance, the association ACEN collects garbage, from which it sorts kitchen waste such as banana and potato peels, which are turned into fuel blocs (briquettes) to be used with adapted stoves. Although a very promising initiative, the association is hampered by capacity constraints, so it seems there is room for similar projects elsewhere in the country.
As part of its social corporate responsibility, the tea factory Sorwathe has also set up a program to disseminate fuel-saving technologies. This comprises not only of more efficient stoves, but also but also of inventive solutions such as cotton-lined baskets to keep cooked food warm while you prepare something else on the stove.
Sorwathe has given free energy-efficient stoves to some 3,000 people and various associations mainly in Kinihira sector (in Rulindo district, where the factory is located), but its first objective is to promote the technology.
"We gave out these stoves for free because some people simply aren't capable of making them or cannot afford them," says Nephtal Kwizera, a technician in charge of energy at Sorwathe. "Yet the main idea is to get the knowledge out by training instructors in the whole country, and to make the people see the advantages. But we need more support for our program; in 2008, we managed to train only 25 associations."
Kwizera also points out that given the specialized technological know-how required to manufacture the stoves, they are still quite costly compared to the traditional ones, which is a major hurdle in convincing people to adopt them.
The obvious answer to this is to make them see that in the medium term, they will save money because they will need to buy less wood. And they will save Rwanda from the disgrace of becoming the Desert of a Thousand Hills.
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