I recently came across an article written by Adam Vaughan for the New Scientist, on the activities schools in the UK are getting involved in to reduce their impact on climate change. The example given is rural school King’s Academy Ringmer, in south-east England, which is now saving around 350 tonnes of CO2 annually with a biomass boiler, while also cutting its energy costs by thousands of pounds a year by installing solar panels, a wind turbine and heat pumps that extract heat from the ground. Of course such installations are costly, and usually schools have many burning priorities that need prior attention. Some UK schools between 2011 and 2016 took advantage of government support to fit solar panels, although such capital-intensive projects are not for every school.

I could not resist but making the comparison with what schools are currently doing in Uganda in their efforts to reduce carbon emissions with their cooking activities. An average school of 700 hundred children reduces 90 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually as they move away from using traditional 3-stone fires to institutional improved cook stoves to prepare the school meals. As deforestation is positively impacted, the school enjoys the financial benefit with an average USD 1,000 saved annually from firewood not purchased. The positive impact is greatly enjoyed by the school that desperately needs the saved money for other resources. What makes it even more attractive, is that such investment to purchase the institutional improved cook stoves costs the school approximately USD 1,500 without any government or grant support. But through Simoshi’s intervention, we are able to provide financing during a 15-month period, to allow the school to comfortably pay back for the appliances using the money saved from the firewood NOT purchased.