When Deborah Nakityo, a retailer and resident of Wakiso trading center heard about the MWOTO stove, she was reluctant to find out more. she didn’t know that the stove would save her the pain of using a traditional three stone fireplace!
With her family of eight, Deborah now rejoices in this new innovation CREEC has brought to her family.
“This stove doesn’t produce smoke and yet it uses wood! It even produces charcoal for me just like the charcoal I buy out there for my sigiri (ordinary charcoal stove)” she says.
She also loves the fact that the stove is cheaper because it saves more than half the amount she used to spend on firewood and cooks faster especially for food that take long to cook like beans. She doesn’t forget noting that the MWOTO cookstove is convenient for people like her who have limited cooking space.
Just like her, many Ugandans have been able to enjoy the innovation of the MWOTO, “The Power of Fire” cook stove. Over 1400 MWOTO stoves have been sold in a very short time and demand of the MWOTO stove rises by the day.
The Mwoto cookstove was developed under the ‘Promoting Improved TopLit Up-Draft Cookstoves in Uganda’ project by the Biomass Initiative for Africa (BEIA) initiative managed by the World Bank Africa Energy Unit (AFTEG) and funded by the Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP), Africa Renewable Energy Access (AFREA) trust funds, provided by the government of the Netherlands.
This stove was developed to help improve people’s cooking ways and to save energy because there is a 93% dependence on traditional charcoal and firewood as a basic source of cooking fuel in the country. This not only brings health problems but has also resulted into the prevailing deforestation and soil degradation which has affected the environment adversely.
The Mwoto cookstove conserves a 50% cooking energy by using less fuel. The stove is also user friendly to the environment because it has a reduced net addition of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and emits less smoke compared to any other biomass stove technologies.
In addition, the Mwoto stove has proven it’s self in laboratories and in pilot studies and market place to be efficient while in use by cooking much faster and creating charcoal after use that is why many people are embracing this innovation.
The implementation of the project activities is currently being carried out by Center for Research in Energy and Energy Conservation (CREEC) in partnership with Joint Energy and Environment Project (JEEP) together with other partners. CREEC is training tinsmiths and entrepreneurs on how to make and market this stove by creating job opportunities to the local people.
Other partners that have made this project a success include WinRock International, Prof. P.S Anderson from Illinios South Africa and Berkeley Air Monitoring Group in California, USA that monitor the project on behalf of the World Bank.
