IWD 2021: Tracking Women’s Access to Clean cooking in Nigeria-Interview with Happy Amos, Managing Director Roshan Global Renewables.
About Happy Amos
Happy Amos is the Managing Director of the Roshan Global Renewable company that manufactures stoves that saves women’s lives in Nigeria. Roshan manufactures modern efficient cookstoves and fuel briquettes and helps women’s entrepreneurship through the sale of these technologies. The company’s modern and efficient stoves are manufactured and distributed by community-based women who earn commission on sales. Her organization specializes in the distribution of these stoves which saves lives by reducing harmful gas and smoke emissions and safeguards the environment for future generations and helps in the empowerment of women. Roshan’s customers are both urban and rural dwellers and they market their products in underserved areas of the country while also carrying out advocacy work in those spheres. Roshan’s stoves additionally enable opportunity, by saving women time that they can use to engage in economic activity. Happy stoves save lives, money, and the environment. An Interview with Happy Amos, Managing Director Roshan Global Renewables on the Clean Cooking industry.
Q: What does your Organization do?
Roshan Renewables is into the Manufacturing of clean cook products which are for different purposes and come in different sizes. We have stoves for domestic purposes which come in different sizes as well as for agro-processing purposes most especially rice processing.
We are also into consultancy services in business development training for SMEs and women-owned businesses in rural communities to bring about clean cooking energy access for women and households.
We also sell products to community resident agencies who earn commission on the sale of stoves -which come as part of financial empowerment for the women who sell cookstoves.
Q: How did the COVID — 19 pandemic affect your organization?
One of our strongest market entry routes is through community-based campaigns and demonstration of the product. We gather women, show them and demonstrate how to use the product, and use the opportunity to tell them about what we do. However, with the covid-19 pandemic and movement restrictions, as well as the health concerns of people gathering in large numbers for such events, we are limited in the number of people we can reach, and this has greatly affected our marketing activities. We have not been able to market our product to communities and also not been able to gather women in large numbers, specifically because of the pandemic. Furthermore, along came the economic recession which brought about inflation, leading to an over 100% increase in the cost of raw materials used in the manufacturing of products. This has made it quite expensive and unattainable for our target customers. These events came at the peak of a business boom for us, and stalled our business activities, and affected our cash flow from the sale of cookstoves.
Q: What approaches did you adopt because of the COVID -19 pandemic?
The Covid-19 pandemic was unchartered territory and every organization was left scrambling to understand what worked for them. The strategy we implored was to start marketing our products online, by utilizing our WhatsApp as a business tool. We used our Whatsapp status as an advertising post, we made Facebook posts that spotlighted our cookstoves and made several sponsored posts on social media. As the lockdown eased, we started marketing the product and targeting several locations. This increased the awareness of the product and what we do to people who were not in our target market, we discovered new people who we did not target previously. It helped us think about better structuring our logistics which involves employing women distributors across the states, to reduce our own physical movement and traveling to showcase or sell the stoves. We also began using logistics companies for delivery services. These are some of the tools we devised to cushion the effect of the pandemic on our businesses.
Q: Why do you feel the transition to clean cooking practices in Nigeria is important?
We lose 100,000 people annually to polluting cookstoves and traditional mode of cooking in Nigeria. Even more dire is the fact that we are depleting our forest reserves, and are losing about 400 hectares of our forest reserves through cutting down trees and utilizing wood from these trees for cooking.
The effects and impact of tree cutting in the environment cannot be quantified and has brought about environmental degradation, desertification in the north, and erosion in the south. It is important to note that access to clean cooking is access to life/livelihood, wealth, and health. Whether there is a pandemic, people will eat, and people will cook. What we want to stop is people using outdated and polluting methods of cooking. Access to clean cooking in Nigeria is very important, and it should be at the fore of access conversations around This is because we lose our women through pollution and health hazards, caused by pollution cookstoves and unclean fuels used for cooking. There is also the time value of money, where the time that could be used for other matters such as schooling, is spent on fetching wood or bent over a smokey stove. It is very important that we look at clean cooking as a national emergency that supports the rights of women, and the education of the girl child and come up with policies and structures that accelerate access to clean cooking for families and communities. It is also important to put in access to finance initiatives to make things more accessible to our people.
Q: What do you think are the major gaps in the Clean cooking Space? How are these gaps hindering the transition to clean cooking in Nigeria? and How can this gap be addressed by the Government and NGOs/CSOs?
One major reason is that we have a high population of persons living in poverty in Nigeria, and therefore it is not inconceivable that a top priority for most people is feeding themselves and their families. Health and environmental issues or concerns, therefore, become secondary to people. However, this is the demography that Clean Cookstoves seeks to support and enable by providing poor rural dwellers with much cleaner, cheaper and sustainable means of cooking.
Secondly, there is hardly any access to finance for business operations across this system. People are basically left to figure out the market, figure out financing with banks that are unwilling to lend to SMEs like us, and with very few clear-cut policies around government policy intervention for clean cooking, the rate of adoption for this technology remains abysmally low.
This means that the transition to clean cooking in Nigeria needs all hands on deck, from the government creating an enabling environment for both the manufactures /NGOs and marketers to build and deploy the products, to banks and microcredit schemes getting on board to ensure that there is adequate financing to support production and financing as well as microcredit to support the purchase of these stoves. There is also the need for NGOs and CSOs to build mass awareness to increase the knowledge, the utility value, and the adoption of Clean Cookstoves.
What needs to be done is that there must be a renewed focus on cookstoves across the energy access conversations occurring at the moment. There needs to be clear-cut policies on clean stoves, and on clean cooking in Nigeria. We ought to have champions in clean cooking, that is people who are championing the course of clean cooking in the government and in the private sector. We also need to have our financial institutions see clean cooking as a financially viable sector that people can invest in and gain returns from. There needs to be a massive awareness campaign in our community, and across the entire country in the area of clean cooking, particularly around the importance of clean cooking, as well as around the hazards surrounding the use of polluting cookstoves and all.
One of the things I think that CSOs and NGOs can do in addressing the gaps is advocacy. We need champions for clean cooking especially in Nigeria. Nobody is really championing this cause for what it is, so we need NGOs and CSOs to champion policies for clean cooking in Nigeria and to also create massive awareness around clean cooking. . Starting from the grass root, and adopting a -bottom-up approach by the CSOs, this type of advocacy will increase the capacity of local manufacturers, and ease entry into the industry.
I think beyond policy-making for this sector, the Government has other roles to play. One of the most important roles would be access to finance, as well as increasing the capacity of the existing manufacturers, and see it as an economic venture that can raise funds, as well as create employment for the populace.
Q: What major clean cooking related activities are your organization planning to carry out in 2021?
Our plan at Roshan Global in 2021, is to create massive awareness around clean cooking and for instance, use tools like social media campaigns to promote the use of charcoal briquettes made from agricultural waste. We are also looking at co-opting other means of cooking including electric pressure cookers to make it more efficient to use and serve as a cleaner cooking means.
Q: What is your advice for anyone looking to enter the clean cooking sector in Nigeria?
My advice is simple! The Clean Cooking sector is a viable economic venture, but it needs a lot of hard work, dedication, and passion to succeed in the sector.
The benefits in the sector are three-fold: 1) You will make money 2) You also get to impact the lives of people positively 3) You will be saving the environment also and reducing carbon emission from cooking with wood and kerosene. So I will encourage anyone to go for it.
