The Community Cooker - Kenya

The Community Cooker is currently operating in three informal settlements in Kenya; Laini Saba Village in Kibera, Karagita in Naivasha and Kawangware, Nairobi. This waste-to-energy technology is addressing sanitation, health and aesthetic issues associated with waste in informal settlements. It is also providing communities with alternatives to charcoal, firewood and paraffin for cooking meals and boiling water and acting as a platform from which community based organizations and institutions can run cost effective income generating activities.

Fast facts:

Over a two hour period, the Community Cooker can cook 77 liters of food and heat 800 liters of water;
2,100 residents can be served by one Community Cooker over a 12-hour period.

The problem

More than 80% of Kenya’s urban dwellers, many of whom live in poor, informal settlements, use charcoal made from wood as their primary source of energy, according to government statistics. On average, urban dwellers burn two kilograms of dry wood, emitting one kilogram of stored carbon.

The solution

The Community Cooker represents a simple, low cost technology with a socially inclusive vision for change, engaging communities to participate in waste collection to exchange for energy to cook food and heat water. Once completely ignited, the Community Cooker can operate 24 hours a day with minimal running cost. The Community Cooker requires only rubbish and small droplets of water and disused engine oil to function at combustion temperatures of over 850 degrees Celsius. While the Community Cooker is currently designed for cooking and boiling water, there is future potential to use the energy produced for alternative income generating activities such as water distillation, and the production of steam, brick and pottery baking and smelting of aluminum, copper, bronze and brass as well as generating off grid electricity.

Helping the planet

The Community Cooker could substantially reduce the burning of firewood and charcoal for cooking and heating, reducing deforestation in the area. Environmental Resource Management (ERM), an international consultancy, has calculated that, if operated all day, the Community Cooker could save the calorific heat equivalent of burning about 3,000 mature trees over one year.

Helping people

The Community Cooker offers resourceful slum dwellers a fuel source that is far less expensive than wood fuel, charcoal, gas or kerosene. It also cuts the amount of time women have to spend looking for firewood and decreases the amount of waste in the street.

Scaling Up

This activity already had four Community Cookers in urban slum areas in Kenya and they have just completed a new prototype which has proved to be more durable and efficient and will be rolled out soon.