Through the Promoting Energy Efficiency and Clean Cooking project, we are promoting sustainable, local production, creating jobs and encouraging new local businesses. We are also helping replace 10,000 traditional stoves with better ones for vulnerable families, and reducing deforestation caused by chopping wood for coal for domestic use. Finally, we are making it easier for families to save on energy products, freeing up money for food, education and health. Eighty per cent of the 200,000 inhabitants of the city of Pemba do not have roads, sewers or running water. Furthermore, 88% of the roughly 40,000 families living there use coal as their main fuel for cooking, with only 11% relying on an electric oven. Our better stoves are reaching our set goals. So far, we have produced and sold more than 2,000 of them and around 67 members of the community are involved in either producing, managing or selling them.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is an action plan signed in September 2015 by 193 UN member states. It incorporates 17 goals aimed at the socio-economic development of communities and regions. In line with the seventh goal, through this project we want to provide access to energy systems that are cheap, reliable, sustainable and modern (Goal 7).

We believe that workplace safety is a fundamental principle that we share with employees, contract workers and local communities. For that reason, we implement all necessary measures to avoid accidents, including organisational models to assess and manage risk, training programmes, skills development and the promotion of a culture of safety.

Our better stoves have made cooking safer and easier and reduced health problems. A few months after they came into use, the reduction in smoke in people's houses was plain to see. The stoves have proven themselves efficient and clearly saved on coal for families. Their heat also lasts longer than that of the traditional “three stones” system of wood or charcoal, which brings serious health risks and wastes a lot of resources.