Land Rover and Ugandan Stoves Fuel Community Development
The benefits of carbon offsetting go far beyond the manufacturing and tailpipe emissions of your Land Rover. It helps to support a local infrastructure; from inspiring industry to domestic development. The Ugandan Stove Project, which is managed by ClimateCare on behalf of Land Rover, is an excellent example.
David Mukisa manages the Uganda Improved Cooking project in Kampala. He has a keen understanding of the mechanism behind this kind of carbon offsetting. From his first hand experience, he knows the benefit that carbon finance can have. In the first year of the Improved Cooking Stove project in Kampala, they were operating without the additional funding provided by carbon offsetting and only managed to sell 3,000 stoves in the first 9 months. Sadly, as their cooking stove technology wasn’t recognised, the Ugandan stove project was unable to secure funding through the compliance market. Thanks to additional finance provided by carbon offsetting, the project became viable, more could be spent on training staff, marketing and sales. The result was a more affordable, accessible to more customers.
David underlined the importance of the finance provided by voluntary carbon offsetting, “Our projects desperately need extra funding in the shortest possible time to get them off the ground. I see the voluntary market as being able to help us whilst still providing rigorous standards for our projects to meet.”
Kiwa, who’s the Inventory Manager at Uganda Stove Manufacturers Ltd, lives in the high density housing that surrounds the factory. Kiwa thoroughly enjoys his job, controlling the movements of stock in and out of the factory. In particular, when an order comes in for a large number of cooking stoves, he relishes the challenge. He’s very proud of the work being done and the positive effect that the project is having on employment in the area. As Kiwa says,“the people living in this area of Kampala are very poor. The stove factory has brought a lot of employment to the area and now employs 56 people, mostly residents of the local parish.”
This is Grace. She’s a local resident who lives a few streets away from the factory. As with most of the people in herneighbourhood, she uses an improved charcoal cook stove for preparing family meals, like the local staple of matoke (green bananas). As someone who uses one of these stoves on a daily basis, she lets us know what the stove is actually like to live with, “I feel happy with it. It functions well and lasts a lot longer than the traditional stove that I used previously. It saves my family money on charcoal and I would not want to change back to using the old stove that I once used.”
Tags: CO2 Offsetting, Land Rover, Uganda
