Low School Fees

It is amazing to see how government schools manage their finances, with low school fees that not only include tuition, but also daily lunch. The Head Teacher at Luzira Church of Uganda Primary School - a government aided school - here explains how magic happens!

Needless to say, we are always proud to remind our readers and supporters (those who offset their carbon footprint when purchasing our carbon credits) that schools manage to save approximately USD 800 per year with their institutional improved cook stoves. For a school that collects such small student fees, these firewood savings make an important positive impact to their finances. Listen to the testimony here below!

Goodbye To Our Friend

Monitoring the schools and kitchens to ensure the institutional improved cook stoves (IICS) are in optimal efficiency operation means we get to meet many of the school staff, and eventually make good friendships.

Our visits are not a one-off, but we go to the schools once a month, from the time the IICS are installed.

Today we received the sad news that Vincent Jemba, the cook at St. Paul Nsambya, had passed yesterday. We have known Vincent since June 2017 when we first installed their IICS at the school.

I would like to write a short story in memory of our friend. I remember very well the day of the IICS delivery and training. Vincent was angry with us because he believed the new IICS would not be able to prepare the posho and beans on time. He was very used to his old stoves and was not ready to change nor use the new ones. The Deputy Head Teacher back then, Ms. Jane (today the HT at Bukasa primary School) told me not to worry, she would speak to him later that day to discuss about the school’s decision.

Two days later I pay a visit to St. Paul Nsambya to check on the cooks and the IICS. As I am approaching the kitchen, there was Vincent standing with a plate of food in his hands, offering me a meal in appreciation for the IICS, as he was feeling comfortable with his new kitchen.

The picture below is from February this year, during the fourth verification visit for our Gold Standard registered project activity. Vincent is on the far right, signing the training sheet. You will be missed.

Size Matters

It’s a tough exercise, getting cooks to chop the firewood to small pieces. It is understandable because they have been used to cooking with huge wood logs in the past when using 3-stone fires.

But the institutional improved cook stoves (IICS) do not need such big pieces of wood. Actually they can damage the combustion chamber, because they are very heavy and break the supporting bricks and grates.

Big wood logs DO NOT cook faster. Contrary to what most cooks believe, big logs only asphyxiate the firewood entrance, blocking aeration and making combustion more difficult. Below is a short video showing the right wood diameter and number of sticks needed to have the perfect combustion, as Kitebi Primary School cooks their beans in a 350 litres saucepan capacity.

The right size and the right quantity of wood is shown on this IICS while cooking beans.

Obituary For A Sampling Approach

A lot is currently being discussed about bringing more transparency to the carbon credit space. Articles are questioning the veracity of GHG emission reductions actually taking place, over estimations, baseline figures, etc..

But how do we achieve reliable data to determine the quality of those carbon credits the Project Developers (PD) are delivering?

Let’s get to the root where everything starts. And that is at the project level. To quantify the impact achieved on the ground, the PD has to collect several indicators and report to the Certification Standard and the accredited auditors. Depending on the technology implemented, the PD uses a specific methodology to follow calculation approaches. These methodologies often provide different options when it comes to the continuous monitoring and reporting of the technology involved.

Nevertheless, the performance monitoring cannot be avoided. This involves tracking the overall performance of the appliance/technology to ensure that it is meeting all its reduction targets. And although a sampling or a census approach is currently allowed, let’s face it, most projects disseminating energy efficient and renewable energy appliances choose to sample their populations because it is cheaper, and because it is not mandatory to monitor the entire population.

There are many downsides to sampling, and that means leading to bias or inaccurate GHG emission reductions taking place. If we want more transparency, then it is time to question buyers of carbon credits too. Sampling is cheaper, and this leads to the scavengers of carbon credits using whatever technology, whatever the additionality, whatever the sustainable development impact(s) and whatever the monitoring approach to choose the cheapest offer out there.

Behaviour Change Key

An energy efficient transition necessitates effortful behavioural changes by cooks and all those involved at school when preparing the daily meals. This not only refers to the cooking appliance itself, but also other items that indirectly affect many of the kitchen activities.

One of the examples we are discussing today is the firewood used. Burning dry firewood with efficient combustion results in clean burning with few particles. When firewood burns, three things happen:

1. Water content is removed by evaporation.

2. Chemically, the firewood breaks down into charcoal, gas and volatile liquids, with carbon dioxide and water being the chief end products.

3. The charcoal burns, forming carbon dioxide either directly or with an intermediate conversion to carbon monoxide.

Institutional Improved Cook Stoves (IICS) minimize the problem of dirty smoke generated from burning firewood and alarming deforestation rates. There are many species of trees all with different forms based on their varying fiber structures and densities. This means they differ in the ways they can be used and also the amounts of energy they store. Firewood does not always contain the same amount of energy. The main reason for this is the water that is stored inside it:

• Fresh wood contains up to 50% of water, and water does not burn.

• When firewood is dried for one year, its calorific value doubles, having the water content decrease from 50% up to 15%

This is why we continuously incentivise schools to build a firewood storage. But as you can see from the pictures here below, sometimes having the storage place built doesn’t mean the firewood won’t still be sitting outside in the rain!!!! Continuous training is key, that is why we visit the schools every month to ensure savings are achieved to the maximum. And that everyone at school changes that behaviour, which can only be achieved with time and patience.

Decent Work For Cooks

Decent work is considered a human right, but for cooks preparing daily meals for children at schools, is a totally different reality. These workers often feel neglected, are paid low wages, working long hours standing, in an unhealthy environment…the load is a daily struggle.

Contributing to the cooks’ wellbeing is one of the achievements we support here at Simoshi towards providing a more dignified job, and a healthier environment to all those involved in the food preparation. Cooking with a 3-stone fire is the major cause of indoor air pollution, as you can see from the picture here below at St. Denis Ssebuggwago Ggaba Secondary School.

Indoor emissions are reduced by half when schools move to energy efficient cook stoves, and as seen on the second picture here posted, there is a clear benefit for the employees as their office, the kitchen, becomes a safer and decent working environment.

Before

3-stone fires are the major cause of indoor air pollution

After

An energy efficient cook stove reduces air pollution by half, providing a cleaner, healthier and safer kitchen environment.

Always An Optimist

An optimist, says the dictionary in many of its versions, is a person who believes that this world is the best of all possible worlds. And this post is today dedicated to all those children we always come across in the schools, with a big smile on their faces, that despite all the adverse conditions they might find back at home, and at school, they are always positively engaging and happy.

Such is the case of Geoffrey, that with all the excitement generated around the new institutional improved cook stoves delivered that same day at his school, decided to give the cooks a helping hand and clean the kitchen. Because it had to look spotless, it had to look good, just like him, with that contagious smile!

A New School Joins

Today we visited Nsangi Mixed Primary School, a government aided school located in Wakiso District. They have moved away from using 3-stone fires to institutional improved cook stoves for all children’s meals. This is a school with a boarding population, meaning they prepare both lunch and supper.

We share the picture of how the kitchen used to look before, and how they are right now, as of today. Another successful story with a new school that will benefit from 50% firewood savings, with cooks also enjoying a healthier environment, as air pollution automatically reduces drastically.

Happy Women's Day

Yesterday we celebrated our day - a woman here writing - so we could not avoid from sharing some interesting statistics about the impact of women in the workforce.

Did you know that only 2.3% of venture capital is going to women-led companies? And that only 11% of energy startup founders identify as women?

And yet, research has shown many times that firms with more women in senior positions are more profitable, more socially responsible, and provide better customer experiences.

And although women and girls experience the greatest impacts of climate change, they are best placed to surface the solutions. So today, and everyday, we celebrate the incredibly resilient girls and women we support in the schools. It is also a day to focus on the inequities and injustices that exist across the sector.

Hello March, Breath In

Every start of the month we write a post about our plans for the upcoming days here at Simoshi. For those who have been following closely since the beginning of this 2023, you might recall we have sold out our last issuance of carbon credits - those emissions reductions generated during 2021 from 95 participating schools. Nevertheless, we are expecting a new issuance very soon as we are on the final performance review stages with the Gold Standard.

Right now we are very busy monitoring the schools, collecting the various indicators necessary to quantify the information that allows this Project Activity to claim for the 9 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) achieved.

Nothing better to illustrate the impact on SDG 3 Good Health & Wellbeing, thanks to the video taken from the kitchen at Lake Victoria Primary School, where Rose, the cook, clearly explains how smoke from the burning firewood has notably reduced, making a huge impact in her health and daily working conditions.

The Bottom 10% Of Emitters Live in Africa And Asia

In this part of the world, despite cooking with the wrong technology - firewood has the highest carbon emission of 1170.57g/J, it takes time 9.43 minutes and consumed 354.29g of firewood to boil the water while Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) consumed 11.43g of fuel in 5.43 to emit 34g of carbon - the average individual in Uganda emits 11 times less CO2 than the average North American.

As reported by the International Energy Agency on the commentary “The world’s top 1% of emitters produce over 1000 times more CO2 than the bottom 1”, published on the 22 February 2023, on their ongoing work to explore people-centred energy transitions, it is no surprise that disparities of emission footprints between countries remain profound. Yet, variations across income groups were even more significant. “ The top 1% of emitters globally each had carbon footprints of over 50 tonnes of CO2 in 2021, more than a 1000 times greater than those of the bottom 1% of emitters. Meanwhile, the global average energy-related carbon footprint is around 4.7 tonnes of CO2 per person…these large contrasts reflect great differences in income and wealth, and in lifestyles and consumption patterns”.

An average school with 800 children reduce approximately 105 tonnes of CO2 per year by changing the traditional 3-stone fires to institutional improved cook stoves (IICS) when preparing their daily meals. A step closer when collectively, and despite differences in footprints, everyone’s behaviours push towards decarbonising fast enough to keep 1.5 C degrees warming in sight.

Fantastic Start

The commencement of the first school term was a hectic one for us here at Simoshi, as we had an amazing demand of institutional improved cook stoves (IICS) from new schools wanting to join our Project Activity.

Since the year 2023 kicked off, five new schools have now improved their kitchen environment and purchased IICS to replace their old cooking practices:

• Mariam High School

• St. Denis Ssebuggwawo S.S. Ggaba

• Kiwafu Muslim Primary School

• Nsangi Mixed Primary School

• Chadwick Namate Primary School

Such high demand means schools are slowly recovering from the tough 2-year closure during the Covid-19 pandemic and the financial struggles this meant to many. We anticipate a busy 2023 and expect another 20 new schools joining before the year ends.

Our Partnership Is In Vogue

Yesterday we received a newsletter from the Clean Cooking Alliance (CCA) announcing a group of organisations — including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Gold Standard (GS), and the Clean Cooking Alliance (CCA), among others, are working to harness the potential of the carbon market and build awareness for market-oriented solutions.

Since 2016, Simoshi has been working hand in hand with the UNFCC and the GS through its registered Project Activity “Institutional Improved Cook Stoves for Schools and Institutions in Uganda” (10345 and GS 4364 respectively). With three successful verifications, and a fourth now underway, we have managed to use carbon credit revenues to help over 100 schools move away from traditional 3-stone fires to energy efficient cook stoves.

“Cooking has historically received insufficient investment from public and private sources. As such, the carbon market, with its large funding flows and rapid growth, could provide the financial resources necessary to rapidly expand clean cooking access. However, clean cooking has struggled to attract sustained, large-scale funding flows from the carbon market”, the newsletter reads. Nothing could be more accurate, when back then in 2016, carbon financing was a “bad word’, an “obsolete concept” or a “failed approach”, we stood up to our convictions and continued to pursue our validation and subsequent verifications.

Owen Hewlett, Chief Technical Officer of The Gold Standard Foundation, said, “For the past 15 years the clean cooking community and carbon market have worked together to refine our approaches to estimating and validating the impact of clean cooking projects. Two years ago, we comprehensively overhauled our methodologies. We will need to make further changes in future as we continue to learn how to make these projects even more effective - and as we align with the Paris Agreement and changing norms in the voluntary carbon market.”

UNFCCC earlier undertook a review resulting in changes to the default values used in CDM methodologies for clean cooking, requiring more conservative conversion factors, baselines, fNRB values and stove stacking assumptions. 

CCA and UNFCCC are currently supporting additional research on methodology updates as they relate to baselines and fNRB values. GS has updated its cookstove methodologies and introduced conservative default factors, improved monitoring requirements with safeguards and caps including maximum permissible levels for key inputs like baseline fuel and usage rate. And we have updated all of our procedures and Project Design Document to ensure the highest integrity is achieved by our Project Activity intervention.

We welcome the latest developments in the cook stove sector, and hope to see many more high quality projects using carbon financing as a tool to deliver the much needed clean cooking devices this part of the world needs.

What A Change!

An image says it all……..therefore there is no need to go into detail to explain how this new school joining our Project Activity, Kiwafu Muslim Primary School, has made a positive impact not only by saving over 50% of firewood when preparing the children’s daily meals.

It has also provided with a decent working space for the cooks, cleaner breathing air to all those in the surrounding areas, and more free time as these institutional improved cook stoves are much faster - please check our Instagram pase as Salimah, here pictured, explains how cooks used to start preparing food at 4am, and now they do so at 8am with their new stoves!

Schools Open Ahead Of Schedule

Some private schools are starting the academic 2023 year ahead of the official government opening of schools calendar on the 6th of February.

Our team is busy deploying new institutional improved cook stoves (IICS) to schools that are new to the Project Activity. This means training of cooks is also under way to ensure proper handling and care, achieving the maximum standards on the kitchen environment.

We found many schools already opening their classrooms to top classes this week. Therefore IICS are urgently needed to prepare the daily meals. Below we share pictures of two new schools in Mityana and Kampala having their IICS installed.

2021 Vintage Sold Out

During our last verification for carbon credits, which was the third since the Project Activity was registered back in 2017, we issued 1,647 Gold Standard verified emission reductions (VERs). This was a smaller amount when compared to our first issuance back in 2019 of 8,457 GS CERs, because the Covid-19 pandemic saw schools in Uganda closed for almost 2 years - which meant cooking activities stopped, hence no emission reductions happened.

Nevertheless, we still managed to issue for the few months schools were allowed to open since March 2020 when restrictions started to be imposed on the population.

And those 1,647 carbon credits that were available for sale on the Gold Standard Marketplace, have now been sold out! As you have read from our previous posts, we are right now busy working on our fourth verification, and expect over 10,000 VERs by the end of March this year - just less than two months away. So please stay tuned as we continue to handhold the schools with their cooking transitions.

Auditor Site Visit

Today we have finished with the on site visit with the local expert from the Gold Standard accredited Validation and Verification body 4KScience India Ltd., as our Project Activity “Institutional Improved Cook Stoves for Schools and Institutions in Uganda” goes through its fourth verification. This is a mandatory exercise when requesting for a carbon credit issuance, that lasted three days, where 14 schools were randomly selected, institutional improved cook stoves (IICS) inspected, and school staff interviewed.

Uganda Stove Manufacturers Limited (Ugastove) responsible for manufacturing the IICS, was also part of the inspection and its CEO Ms. Rehema Nakyazze took answered many questions regarding operational procedures, quality assurance and quality control, and safety measures in place.

Below are some images of the intensive days of school visits from Simoshi’s total population of 95 schools.

Hello 2023

Perseverance pays off, at least here at Simoshi we always claim to never give up…..and we love to share stories such as the one from Mariam High School. This is a girls only boarding school with 460 pupils, a school we have been visiting since early 2017, visiting the kitchen, sensitising the school administrators, and annually checking up on them as we explained why joining Simoshi’s Project Activity would be a good choice.

The school called us this week to announce some great news! They will be destroying their old stoves and getting rid of the 3-stone fires this January, starting the school term in 2023 with their new institutional improved cook stoves (IICS). They have been consuming 8 trucks of firewood per term, and we cannot wait to see them reducing their consumption to half as we bring the new IICS to their kitchen.

Wrapping Up 2022

We would like to close the year with a last blog post that highlights a summary of the successes achieved during 2022. Despite the usual ups and downs and most importantly, the consequences of the post Covid-19 pandemic economic effects on the population and schools, here at Simoshi we have managed to reach the highest number of schools included under the Project Activity.

The purpose of this project activity is the dissemination of institutional improved cook stoves (IICS) in schools and institutions in Uganda. The IICS disseminated are manufactured by Uganda Stove Manufacturers Limited (Ugastove). The model is the portable rocket firewood IICS of different sizes that meet the minimum thermal efficiency requirement of 20%. The different IICS sizes are conditioned by the saucepan capacity and range from 30 litres and up to 450 litres.

The sale of IICS and increase number of schools using the cooking technology ensures access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy is achieved. Through a continuous data input to the Simoshi’s sales database and quarterly through the on-site inspection of the IICS to confirm it is performing in optimal manner, Simoshi monitored the number of 95 new schools/institutions that accessed clean energy services and their 336 IICS in use of different saucepan capacities during the monitoring period.

Our message to readers can only be of gratitude, as usual! We look forward to the opportunities 2023 has to bring, and embrace challenges that have always guided our team to become stronger, more resilient and better when helping schools when improving their cooking activities.

Before and After

On-going training of all kitchen staff involved in the preparation of school meals is part of Simoshi’s obligations, to ensure an optimal performance of the institutional improved cook stoves (IICS).

Unfortunately, not every school delivers the same results, and during our quarterly spot-checks when supervising the IICS conditions, we find these can be very different. Although most schools’ IICS usually need maintenance once a year, when cooks neglect the advice give to take good care of their stoves, those same repairs can happen three times a year.

The typical mistakes that really damage the IICS combustion chamber is using big firewood logs, which end up cracking and breaking the grates and bricks that support such firewood.

Below are two videos that very clearly show the condition of a “before” and “after” situation as our Maintenance Officer performs the IICS repairs during the quarterly school visit. And remember, all there repairs are free of cost to all participating schools under our Project Activity.