Many have tried to fix the problem of dirty, unhealthy, and unsustainable cooking fires used by so many people around the world. This article does a good job of summarizing the efforts to date as either too expensive to be sustainable, or too cheap to be reliable.
Inyenyeri—a company in Rwanda—is trying to change that by moving to the razor/blades model of giving away a high-quality stove (the mimi moto) and charging for the fuel it burns. It's a much better model for their market as it requires no large initial capital expenditure to get started. And they even have a firewood trade-in program, and the wood they receive can then be turned into pellets that burn with 2–3✕ efficiency compared to firewood.
There are still growing pains, the biggest of which is getting a large, reliable supply chain going for the pellets. I hope they have enough capital runway to get there. I'd love to seem them succeed in Rwanda so they can expand to other countries.
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