Sustaintech India Pvt. Ltd. - India

Sustaintech India Pvt. Ltd. is working to build a more just, equitable and sustainable world through the introduction of fuel-efficient cookstove technology as a livelihood product for women-owned street food vendors and other small roadside eateries in India.

Fast facts:

Sustaintech is operating in south India in the states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka;
To date, Sustaintech has sold 3,000 stoves generating over USD 1 million and mitigating 40,000 tonnes of CO2. About 20% of these stoves are being used in women-owned businesses;
So far, the stoves have created additional incomes of USD 2 million for low-income people;
The stoves are in used in 400 towns;
Sustaintech has a staff of about 40 people with a majority of staff members being sales force and technicians.

The problem

Innovations in cookstoves have only focused on household cooking, but many people, especially women, earn their income by cooking for people outside their family. Climate change affects the poorest and the most vulnerable in the developing world and women are poorer and do not have much access to resources, opportunities for acquiring skills and mobility.

The solution

Sustaintech has developed a loose biomass stove that comes in three sizes. The stoves are being used in food processing units that prepare ready to eat fried foods and sweets. The stoves use agro residues like cashew shells, groundnuts, coffee and areca husks, without converting them into pellets or briquettes. These large cookstoves offer local and global environmental benefits and a path out of poverty for small time cooks. Each cook (about 50% of them being women) works in the proximity of a cookstove for 330 days per year and 8-10 hours each day. This is a very high health burden on cooks often with loss of livelihood on health grounds.
Helping the planet

Each stove can save about 10 tonnes of firewood or 15 tonnes of CO2 per year. The expected stove lifetime is five years.

Helping people

Sustaintech promotes women's leadership and builds women's capacity at the grassroots level by preferentially catering to the needs of women-led cooking businesses. It is taking action to neutralize the negative ecosystem barriers that women face in running kitchens and tea stalls that serve low cost meals to poor people. These include creating awareness and marketing communication targeted at women in cooking enterprises, free installation and servicing of stoves, enabling access to finance for women in cooking enterprises plus several confidence building measures like training to reduce risk and vulnerability of women in food related businesses.

Scaling Up

Sustaintech aims to scale up. As Indian cooking has wide regional variations, a number of stove designs are in use in the southern and western states of India. This has ensured that Sustaintech develops a range of stoves that meet every cooking need. Sustaintech’s partnership model is designed to be scalable. The manufacturing is outsourced and they have multiple consumer finance partners. After three years of direct sales, Sustaintech is also beginning to appoint distributors, further increasing access to their products in multiple locations.