What Has Been Really Transformative Are Carbon Credits. They Allowed Us To Scale,” Molly Brown, Head Of Carbon Strategy BURN Manufacturing

One company with a mission to reduce emissions from cooking has manufactured highly efficient and modern wood and coal-fired cookstoves that have been saving lives and improving people’s well-being in developing countries. BURN Manufacturing designs, produces and distributes Africa’s best-selling, fuel-efficient biomass, electric, hybrid and liquid fuel cooking appliances while also generating carbon credits for the voluntary carbon market.

The company founded in 2011 and headquartered in Kenya, has launched Sub-Saharan Africa’s first and only modern cookstove facility in Kenya back in 2014. Thanks to revenue from carbon markets from selling its carbon credits, it has managed to hit an impressive milestone of more than 3.6 million cookstoves sold so far and has managed to scale at a rapid pace.

We interviewed Molly Brown, Head of Carbon Strategy at BURN Manufacturing. She shares some of the past and more recent milestones of the company and explains how they have improved people’s health, budget and quality of life in Africa and developing countries elsewhere.

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What is the activity of BURN Manufacturing? What do you do?

BURN is a cook stove company and a carbon project developer. We are quite unique in the sense that we cover the full end-to-end value chain of stoves – from research and development all the way through manufacturing, distribution and selling the products. We see the full value chain which enables us to optimize for quality all along.

What is BURN’s technology? How does it reduce more CO2 emissions compared to competitive wood-fired cookstoves typically sold in developing countries?

We make finely engineered stainless steel cookstoves. There are still 2 billion people in the world who are cooking with open fires. If you are switching from using a stonefire or very smoky, inefficient charcoal stove, over to one of the BURN stoves, you reduce your fuel consumption. 

The reduction in wood when we compare woodstoves to our stoves is 70% and the reduction of charcoal is around 60%. That is what is driving the carbon credits. This summer we are also launching a new line of electric products at scale. 

We have been piloting them for a couple of years. What is exciting about them rolling out across Africa, is that you can go to almost zero emission cooking because the grid is constituted of around 75% renewables in Kenya for example. When switching a family from cooking with charcoal to cooking on an electric stove, there is a huge reduction in the amount of emissions.

What are the electricity access rates of households in Africa?

I think at the moment there is about 75% connectivity in urban areas which is expected to grow to 90% by 2030. Not everywhere households have access to electricity and certainly not in some rural areas but there can be quite good electrification. We are entering six new countries this year and we will be targeting areas where there are good electrification rates.

What are the benefits of these cookstoves? Are there any downsides?

The first one is the environmental benefit. If you burn less wood fuel, you are emitting less carbon dioxide, but also other pollutants like black carbon and carbon monoxide. Using less wood fuel also translates to cutting down fewer trees so there is a link to deforestation and forest degradation. 

Another benefit is in terms of the human side. What we see is that it’s typically women and children who are bearing the brunt of all the cooking-related tasks. When you move to a more efficient cookstove, it unlocks time that was previously spent collecting firewood or charcoal. We see a reduction of an hour every day spent on cooking which is invested in other activities. 

We also see really improved health outcomes, mostly for women and girls, because of the reduction of indoor air pollution. BURN’s cookstoves are the only ones to have an independent randomized controlled trial, done on us by American academics who validated those findings. 

The savings have been validated in terms of fuel which translates into savings of time, and health improvements. The final one is cost savings or spending less money on charcoal. Those savings can then be reinvested into other things. 

We have lots of lovely testimonials from people saying they are spending the leftover money on their child’s education, or reinvesting them into their businesses. This can really be transformative for a family as charcoal is very expensive.

What is also really nice about BURN is that we have high usage rates because people actually like cooking on our cookstoves. Over the last 10 years, we have done a very iterative design process and we have been taking customer feedback to make sure our stoves are suitable for local cooking needs.

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