- Massive deforestation in Tanzania has left policymakers scrambling for options and they have now set an ambitious target for Tanzania to switch to clean energy kitchens by 2025.
- A huge challenge, however, remains how to dismantle Tanzania’s $1 million charcoal industry that provides livelihoods to millions of poor citizens from illegal forest loggers in the countryside to small-scale urban traders.
- Tanzania’s Ministry of Energy data shows at least 33,000 people die every year due to complications associated with the continued use of charcoal, firewood, and other crop residues for cooking.
I find Joseph Lucas, a charcoal delivery man in Dar es Salaam hurriedly carting neatly packed sacks of the black carbon residue to his customers in Tanzania’s commercial capital.
Lucas is part of the supply chain of charcoal in a country where roughly 90 percent of households depend on the wood fuel product as their primary source of energy. The dealers make a good income to sustain their families while the government also earns revenue from the trade sustainability notwithstanding.
“This sack of charcoal goes for around $16. I have three, and each one has to be charged by the local authorities and forest resources authorities,” Filbert Omogi, another charcoal dealer, told The Exchange.
Omary Mnandi, also a dealer in the sprawling estates of the port city, strives to make ends from the charcoal business, an industry that has left close to 470,000 hectares of forest in Tanzania depleted, and worsening the environment according to data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
“I get two, maybe three orders per week, depending on the consumption flow. I sell each sack for $25 to $27,” adds Omary.
Massive deforestation in Tanzania has caught the eye of policymakers who have set out an ambitious target for Tanzania to switch to clean energy kitchens by 2025.
According to Tanzania’s Ministry of Energy, at least 33,000 people die every year due to complications associated with the continued use of charcoal, firewood, and other crop residues for cooking.
Energy minister January Makamba told Mwananchi Communications Limited (MCL) that the number of deaths associated with “unclean cooking” is far greater than those dying from HIV/AIDS disease or road accidents.
Clean cooking energy
Overall, only a paltry eight percent of Tanzania’s population uses clean cooking energy, compared to 17 percent in neighbouring Kenya while the global average stands at 70 percent.
The huge number of people still dependent on wood fuel for their cooking needs, however, will present an enormous challenge for policymakers in Tanzania to surmount in their quest to eradicate “dirty cooking” in record two years.
To achieve their target, the government has set an ambitious 10-year plan for a majority of its citizens to switch to clean energy under a National Vision for the Use of Clean Energy for Cooking.
In the short-term, Suleiman Jafo, the Minister of State, Vice President’s Office (Union and Environment) has directed all the public institutions in Tanzania that offer catering services to more than 100 people to cease using charcoal and firewood by January 31, 2024, and instead put in place measures to use renewable clean energy.
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Further, organizations that are using wood fuel to prepare food for more than 300 people have been urged to stop using wood products as a source of energy by January 31, 2025.
Last year, Tanzania’s Ministry of Energy hosted its first clean cooking energy conference, where different players highlighted the need to harness and adopt the use of natural gas for citizens’ consumption.
The government of Tanzania also plans to amplify awareness campaigns related to the use of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) to help save the environment.
Already, joint efforts by the Rural Energy Agency (REA) and Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation (TPDC) are expected to supply natural gas to 100,000 people in the country’s South and Coast regions.
Supply modern stoves
The director-general of the Rural Energy Agency, Hassan Saidy, said the “government also plans to supply modern stoves as we move towards clean energy. We will continue to use charcoal but use stoves that have been improved so that we will distribute them to the villages through subsidies.”
But given the attendant costs involved, the ambitious programme to get millions from dependency on forests for energy might be bogged by huge challenges as about 26 million Tanzanians live below the poverty line, using $1.9 a day, and most environmental concerns by policymakers and international organizations are the least of their concerns.
In Dar es Salaam, Joseph, Omary and others are part of a complex web of players in Tanzania’s $1 million charcoal industry, a sector that provides livelihoods to millions of poor citizens from illegal forest loggers in the countryside to small-scale urban traders across the country’s cities and towns.
From tree logging to baking to transporting, and selling – a significant number of Tanzanians put their lives in danger, wading through various health and legal risks to earn a living from the grueling work.
2019 statistics from Tanzania’s forestry industry show that the sector accounted for about three percent of its Gross Domestic Product with earnings from the sale of logs, poles, honey, tree seedlings, firewood, and charcoal as well.
This is not the first time Tanzania is setting out on an ambitious plan to tackle the trade in charcoal and wood fuel. In 2006, a similar undertaking to ban the use of charcoal did not go far as traders continued with the business but the government recorded fewer earnings from the industry.
This time around, Tanzania is inviting other players in the undertaking and has already directed gas and stove companies to take advantage of the new order to help eliminate use of charcoal and firewood in the country’s kitchens.
In Dar es Salaam, Mohamed, a resident relies on 6kg gas cylinder supplied by traders such as Oryx and Taifa Gas to meet his cooking energy needs.
“It is safe, clean, and reliable. I switch on, boil, cook, or warm up my food and enjoy my time. Gas simplifies life a hundred-fold compared to charcoal,” Mohamed says.
Mohamed spends less than $15 for his 6kg gas cylinder that lasts for months, an expense that is a fraction of $25 for a sack of charcoal.
A 2018 national survey by Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation (TPDC) shows that a household of six to eight people could save up to $27 a month by using natural gas instead of environmentally unfriendly charcoal. In contrast, the same home might consume 90 kilos of charcoal worth $39.26 a month.
The same home can save around $23 by opting for locally sourced natural gas instead of imported cooking gas. Further, the TPDC report indicated that one kilo of LPG costs $1.28-$1.45, and households may consume an average of 0.8 kilos of LPG a day.
Tanzania holds about 57.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves, with over 47 trillion cubic feet held in offshore fields.
In June last year, President Samia Suluhu’s administration entered into a deal with Norway’s Equinor and UK’s Shell, bringing closer the country’s plan to set up a $30 billion liquefied natural gas (LNG) export infrastructure.
Efforts to commercially harness Tanzania’s LNG resources had stagnated for several years under former President, the late John Pombe Magufuli.
