More than 90% of rural households in Tanzania rely on traditional cooking methods and use firewood as main fuel for cooking, with negative effects on the environment on one side because of deforestation and human health on the other side because of the negative effects of polluted air on the local population.

Deforestation and climate change is a pressing concern for Tanzania: from 2001 to 2020 the country lost 2.70Mha of tree cover, equivalent to a 10% decrease in tree cover since 2000, and produced 910Mt of CO₂e emissions related to cooking practices (https://www.globalforestwatch.org/).

The mortality rate attributed to indoor air pollution (IAP) is 139 every 100,000 deaths every year (World Bank, 2016). Since cooking is predominantly a women’s business, women and girls are the ones affected the most by this condition. In average, women spend between 3 to 7 hours per day in collecting firewood and cooking related activities and are exposed 3 to 5 times more than men to polluted air from firewood combustion.

Clean Cooking to combat climate change in Tanzania is a project that aims at contributing to the reduction of CO2 emissions derived by the use of fossil fuel for cooking and deforestation through the promotion of alternative clean cooking among rural households. The traditional stoves mostly used by rural households will be replaced with locally-made, portable, modern firewood cookstoves with high thermal efficiency (approx. 35%) that help to reduce up to 70% the wood consumption.

This project will be implemented in Central Tanzania in Morogoro region, within Ifakara Province, Kilombero District and Malinyi District targeting 6 villages for a total number of about 2.500 households which will included in project activities.

OffgridSun will partner with the Tanzanian NGO TAREA (Tanzania Renewable Energy Association) and the Tanzanian solar energy company MUTINA Group to implement the acctivities.
The project foresees the training of groups of women to become clean cooking facilitators and cookstoves agents who will in turn sensitize other women living in the targeted communities on clean cooking and environment conservation and will sell the cookstoves at a subsidized prize in order to make them more affordable for the rural households. The project will contribute to create job opportunities for local women who will receive a commission for each cookstove sold.

The project is expected to save approximately 15.000 tonnes of CO2 per year.

Two stakeholders consultation meetings were held February 2022. Repsectively on the 15th of February in Man’gula and on the 17th of February 2022 in Malinyi.

Stakeholders can also provide feedbacks on the project online at this email address: projects@offgridsun.com

Here below the projects main documents as submitted to Gold Standards:

Zambia remains one of the countries in Africa with the least access to water, sanitation and hygiene services. According to the data collected by the Zambia Demographic and Health Survey (DSH 2018), only 58 % of rural households has access to basic drinking water services while the rest of the population relies on unimproved water sources such as ponds, shallow wells, surface water such lakes and rivers. Access to safe drinking water for most rural communities in Zambia is still a challenge and despite efforts to improve this situation done by the Government, many rural communities do not have proper access to water.

The causes of the limited access to safe water for rural households are related either to low availability of boreholes which are not sufficient to cover the needs of the fast-growing population, therefore providing a limited quantity of water per each household, or to the low efficiency of the existing boreholes, which often do not function properly because of lack of maintenance or replacement of broken spares. Therefore, the communities either drink the unsafe water exposing themselves to water borne diseases or have to boiling the water to purify it often using firewood and charcoal, in turn polluting the environment, contributing to disforestation and exposing people, mainly women and children, to breath intoxicate air.

In Chipangali district, located in the Eastern part of the country, where the project is implemented, the water access situation is critical. From a survey performed in 2021 by the local NGO Pamodzi Ndi Ana in collaboration with the Chipangali District Water and Sanitation Office on the current situation of safe water access in the rural areas, it emerged that a number of villages have no boreholes at all, others have one borehole but is not functioning and the rest of the villages have only one borehole which is functioning but need more water supply to serve all the population.

Therefore, about 20.000 people currently do not have access to safe water in the area, but have to fetch water from open sources such rivers, dams & open pans, which are prone to contamination from human activities.

• The objective of the project is to improve the livelihoods of people living in Chipangali Distict, where there is no or poor access to safe water by providing sufficient, affordable, and clean drinking water to the communities within reasonable proximity, by doing the following activities:
• Rehabilitation of already existing but broken boreholes
• Creation of new boreholes in villages without access to safe water at all
• Creation of new additional boreholes in villages where the boreholes already existing but not sufficient to cover the needs of the population
• Training the local population on WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) topics

Here below the projects main documents as submitted to Gold Standards: