Mashesha stoves

Mashesha stoves - As a Business Opportunity

Business model

Our business model is three-fold, at two levels. The level of the business system, our social enterprise provides a sellable social-ecological, gender-sensitive product.

Applying for Corporate Social responsibility to donate stoves so that

Demand is created for a business spin-off for agents to sell or rent out stoves across many communities. Both the selling and renting models automatically include skills development as training is needed for the value chain.
Our business model for society (triple bottom line) is a product that builds social and as monetary capital which reduces burdens on women (and, if expanded to communities, the girl- child)

Viability evidence

Route to Market

Main competitors

Success Indicators

Addressable market in Africa

Activities based Budget (R1 200 000 investment)

Activity based budget(Less than R 600 000 investment)

Mashesha stoves - A Social & Energy efficient innovation for Rural communities

Introduction

Communal and mass cooking for school feeding schemes and social events is a fundamental part of the socio-economic fabric of South Africa where social capital and cohesion are built around the iconic and fragrant ‘cooking pot’. This is an enduring South African reality which sustains the livelihoods of 11% of South Africans that rely on wood fuel for cooking. Of the national 11%, 36% of the rural population rely on wood fuel for cooking.

Yet the idealised picture of the ‘cooking pot’ comes at the cost of many hours of unpaid labour for rural women who work with unsafe fires in confined, polluted kitchens (for which no statistics or minimum health standards exist) in order to feed 9 million primary school learners in South Africa (the selected sample for this case). An extrapolation of this figure, for the purposes of this proposal (halving the 9 million and estimating 3 cooks per school), has 34 500 rural women whose health is compromised (and time is wastefully depleted to achieve nutrition for children’s survival and learning.)

Added to this, the supply chain to bring the wood to schools has wider environmental implications. There is the obvious deforestation, global warming and climate change accelerated through carbon-burning fuels. There is the cost of transporting the wood to schools and the use of school budgets for fuel, which fruitfully can be diverted into direct educational resources.

In the face of this overlooked societal need for these ‘invisible’ women, the social enterprise, Sustainability Professionals (Pty) Ltd (SP) has created a unique, mobile 16kg (66 cm high x 50 cm wide) Mashesha stove. The stove burns with a clean, hot, efficient flame that saves roughly 56% of wood fuel. The Mashesha stove is made of mild steel, painted with high heat black paint for durability. Mashesha is a SiSwati word and loosely translated means “Fast cooking”.

Crafted as a compact double-barrelled metal chambered drum with strategically placed air vents, significantly small amounts of wood are combusted and heat is prolonged, for the large 50-Litre cooking pot through catalytic secondary ignition of syngas. Supplement fuel can be made from waste cardboard and daily cooking by-products which burn equally well in the stove. The making of supplement fuel is a further novelty: its ease of creation allows for work opportunities inclusive of people with disabilities.

The entrepreneurial venture is built around a tested multiplier effect of donating stoves as well as intensive skills transfer. The skills grown are around the use of the stove, making of supplement fuel, health, gender and environmental issues etc. The viability of this gender-sensitive, labour and energy-efficient stove for rural livelihoods has proved itself through strong marginal utility, personal testimonies, and baseline data. SP’s business innovation of donating stoves into poor rural communities intends to create a market demand which stimulates the industrial production of the stove.

Employment of people at provincial or rural levels is increased through the production of the stove through two respective medium and microenterprises. More importantly, there is the commission model which allows rural communities to buy the stoves and set up their own micro businesses in a diversified business model. It is self -evident that this original invention and applied business model comprehensively meets all the criteria for social innovation.

Innovative aspect

Awards

Social innovation with relevance to Rural persons, woman and youth

At Sustainability Professionals (Pty) Ltd, we do social enterprise so as to grow the empowerment, health and localized equality of mainly rural women to address the well-documented triple burdens of poverty (low-income groups), unemployment and inequality (women and female youth). These are starkly felt here, in the unequal society in the world (2016: Gini coefficient-0.77). Statistics SA shows that, while poverty has been addressed for South Africans since democracy, poverty of rural women is still a defining contour of our society. Despite the fact that these are big challenges, they are still felt at very local and context-specific levels, such as our main site of operations, rural Mpumalanga. Our social innovation narrative is therefore anchored in both big and small domains.

In the big domain, we anchor our social innovation principles in the Sustainable Development Goals –
SDG 5: Gender Equality,
SDG 7: Access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all and
Goal 13: Facilitates action to combat climate change and its impacts.

While these are large and ambitious goals for the globe, the SDGs will only be achieved through local mobilization and social innovations which incrementally build the national achievements for the global SDGs. Therefore in the local domain, the innovative design of our cook stove harnesses gasification principles built on environmental and health effectiveness and efficiency principles; allows for waste cardboard/paper to be used so that people, including those with disabilities, may make 'paper coal' which provides supplement fuel; reduces fuel load demand, and ensures a clean burn-high heat flame. The safe labour-saving design eases the gender burden in relation to daily workload & decent work in rural areas.

There are many energy efficient cookstoves available but none that can accommodate a 50L pot that is used for such environmentally-sound cooking for learners in crèches, primary schools (as noted in our sample) and high schools, on a daily basis. Additionally, there are the community events such as weddings, funerals, and community development events where communal safe cooking is needed to be done in a time-saving manner, so that women are freed up to share in the events, instead of being invisible labour in the background.

The Gender Inequality Index for South Africa demonstrates that South African women score at the low 83 rank for economic empowerment. Therefore, the business side of this enterprise model, built on the social capital of women who network in these collective cooking spaces, deliberately sets out to donate the stove to a sample of schools or community members so that there is an immediate and concrete demonstration of its value. Building from ‘the bottom of the pyramid’, these women are socially facilitated to initiate their own business conversations to join with SP as agents to sell the stove on commission.

Social needs to be addressed

The impact of the innovation on a social need

Applicability to Rural persons, woman and youth