3p Editor Jen Boynton is in Mozambique this week along with TreeHugger’s Brian Merchant to get the full story on a remarkable triple-bottom-line business model. Read on…
Sales rep Lonola Tembo explains the cook stove to me
There are many companies and NGOs working to attack the problem from different angles. We’ve covered solar cookstoves a few times here on TriplePundit before, and they have an obvious benefit with their clean, free fuel. However, they still lack the ability to control temperature and are difficult to use indoors unless you have a lot of windows. None of these solutions has managed to gain traction despite the multi-million dollar economic opportunity they represent.
One company, CleanStar Ventures, understands both the financial opportunity and the social and environmental imperative. CleanStar invests in, builds, and scales triple-bottom-line business models in emerging markets around the world. CleanStar Mozambique, their latest and fastest growing project, was founded to tackle the cookstove problem with a bilateral solution: new clean-burning ethanol stoves and an ethanol processing facility to fuel them. This full-service solution means that they’re creating jobs not only for the folks who market and sell the stoves, but for producers and cassava farmers to create the ethanol. Thus far, they’ve had multiple investments in the 7-figure range from multi-national corporations including Novozymes, ICM, and Bank of America.
We’ll be covering the entire value chain in a series of posts – starting with this simple question: how do you enter a market that is pretty much entirely fragmented with individual charcoal vendors and stove welders? Try a western model, applied to an African audience: the Avon lady.
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