Browsing: Oryx

Burn Manufacturing, Taifa Gas, Oryx Tanzania, January Makamba

The fog in Tanzania’s transition to clean kitchens

Industry and Trade
  • 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

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