DELAGUA
LIVE WELL, COOK BETTER Sustainable Business Magazine speaks to Kate Bruges, Communications Director at DelAgua, about the company’s incredible project to provide stoves to every poor rural household in Rwanda – and how its doing it through carbon credits. DelAgua is engaged in an extraordinary project in Rwanda. It is committed to providing every single household in the country’s poorest rural areas with a brand new, highly efficient cooking stove. Crucially, the company is on track to complete this feat by 2024. Kate Bruges, Communications Director at DelAgua, shares with Sustainable Business Magazine how the company started on this road – and why its name is DelAgua:
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“Neil McDougall is the Chairman and founded the business. His background is in the international water industry and he achieved considerable success including the privatisation of a UK water business. McDougall wanted to really give back, so he worked with the University of Surrey on the development of a very robust water testing kit. These kits are still produced today and used by aid agencies when they want to test the quality of the water particularly, for example after a natural disaster. That’s the reason for the company’s water-based name. DelAgua then identified an innovative household water filter for individual households. It enabled almost any water to be filtered into potable water, and it was the product that McDougall first took to Rwanda. “However, over time and after discussions with the Rwandan government, it became very apparent that clean cooking was a bigger issue. If we could provide a clean-cooking stove, then we’ve automatically given a family the ability to create clean water through
efficient boiling. As a result, we very quickly switched to a clean cooking stove program. That was about 10 years ago.” DelAgua’s long-running Rwandan stove program – called Tubeho Neza, which means “Live Well” in Kinyarwanda, the local language, began slowly, but more recently has picked up speed rapidly. “To put it into context, until the end of 2021, we had given out 600,000 free stoves,” says Ms. Bruges. “That is a very substantial number of stoves. Yet, by the end of 2022, we’d ramped up that number to 1.2 million stoves in Rwanda. Today, we are fully funded and on-track to provide 2.3 million stoves by the beginning of 2024. That will be one stove for every single rural household. It’s the biggest stove project of its kind in Africa.” IN IT FOR THE LONG-TERM A stove is little help by itself, though. That’s why DelAgua nests the stove within a program of support and long-term care. Ms.