Displaced women in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo eating together in a shared tent.
In a 5-month period, Doctors Without Borders treated over 500 instances of rape associated with collecting firewood in a camp of about 20,000 people.
For the 15 million refugees in Africa, firewood is the source of 80% of energy used for cooking. An estimated 100kg per month is used per household, most of which is collected by women.
This is where 90% of gender-based violence occurs in these communities.
According to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports, women are often forced to collect firewood, sometimes travelling up to 10km and spending over 6 hours a day. The gendering of this activity is mainly due to views that women are more dispensable to expose to danger. Sexual violence is so prevalent that the Kenyan government sometimes sends police patrols to accompany women during these forays.
This is what inspired Sam Bennett, Matthew Frehlich, Lucas Siow, and Gowtham Ramachandran, winners of Rotman MBA’s Hult Prize competition, to create an alternative fuel. The Hult Prize is a non-for profit organization that provides annual seed funding of USD 1 million for a team of university students with the winning pitch for a social enterprise. The prompt this year is for students to pitch ‘sustainable, scalable start-up enterprises to restore the rights and dignity of 10 million refugees by 2022’.
“We keyed in on that shocking statistic about firewood collection and sexual assault and decided to target cooking fuel as a way of combating gender based violence,” said Bennett.
What is Moto?
Moto is a log made from coffee grounds, wax, and sugar. The team got started by looking for raw materials that were deemed waste and came across coffee logs. They’re made from coffee grounds, usually paid by shops to get removed, that a small portion would sometimes be recycled into home deco. Using an Instagram recipe and some experimentation, the team was able to build a prototype to cook the equivalent of UN rationed food.
In the process of creating Moto, the team considered the reasons why previous attempts at implementing alternative cooking fuels have failed.
“Using a solar oven is a big departure from cooking over a flame,” said Bennett.
A study on refugee cooking options by the UNHCR shows several criteria for an ideal cooking fuel option that extend beyond being able to heat food. For market adoption, it should be culturally acceptable, unattractive for resale, and targeted towards women and children. For long-term economic sustainability, it should not be given away freely in order to promote concepts of conservation. In addition, refugees should distribute the fuel themselves for both cost effectiveness and the development of commerce management abilities.
Additional Benefits
In addition to keeping women safe from assault, Moto seeks to give them more hours in a day to nurture the next generation. Gathering firewood is a time intensive activity that takes up to 6 hours each day, which could be spent creating income and educating children.
When the average African refugee household spends 25% of their income on firewood, switching to Moto, which is 30% cheaper, can save a tremendous amount of money. In the team’s case study of the Kakuma refugee camp, an estimated 3.0M is spent annually on firewood consumption. This is a fraction of the overall market that sees over 15 million refugees spending USD320 million on traditional fuel sources.
Moto is also good news for the environment - coffee logs burn 40% cleaner than firewood.
Finally, the team has bold plans to employ Canadian refugees for production.
“Our plan is to rent a warehouse in Scarborough. Based on discussions with members of the Canadian Immigration Refugee board we are confident we would be able to employ recently settled Syrian refugees to assemble Moto logs in a Scarborough facility.” Siow said during the presentation.
To Bennett, his team’s edge in the final round came from visually demonstrating that the product could scale.
“On competition day, we were unique in that we were able to show we had created a product and made it work.”