Transforming Lives & Nature Through Enterprise
DelAgua is a social enterprise with over a decade of experience in creating and delivering large scale clean cooking projects focussed on transforming the lives of the rural poor in Least Developed Countries across Africa. For these communities, who subsist well below the poverty line and who represent up to 90% of the population in the countries we serve, access to clean cooking has been unaffordable. DelAgua pioneered using carbon finance as the way to generate long term sustainable funding to provide clean cookstoves alongside integrated education and support, free of charge, and at scale, for the poorest people in the poorest countries. DelAgua’s mission is Transforming Lives and Nature Through Enterprise. To date, through our “Live Well” programme, we have distributed 1.5 million high-quality, high-performance stoves, free, in Rwanda, The Gambia and Sierra Leone.
We believe that success comes from developing effective partnerships with host Governments so that we can understand the country’s clean cooking requirements and precisely target those sectors of the rural population most in need and who are not served by other initiatives, so additionality is assured.
Our next step is always to understand, in depth, the communities with whom we partner and provide a stove and education programme that works for the reality of the women and their lives and delivers the step change in performance they need and notice. Ongoing education and support, delivered in home to every family, achieves very high usage levels and behaviour change is lasting. Our model is to train local talent and transfer skills, creating empowered country teams and a large network of trusted Community-based Workers who provide education and ongoing support. Live Well currently employs 6000 Community Workers, providing skilled, long-term jobs in areas where such opportunities are scarce.
DelAgua differentiators include our direct management of every aspect of project design and implementation and our specialist understanding of tracking and measurement to provide accuracy, integrity and to optimise carbon credit yield. Our use of technology enables the geolocation of stoves and monitoring of household usage at scale: we track specific data from every single stove via household surveys conducted in person, every 6 months, throughout the 10-year life of the stove. This is unique in the sector. Purchasers of DelAgua’s carbon credits can therefore have an exceptional level of confidence in their integrity, impact and authenticity and this data also provides the insights for DelAgua to develop further products and services to benefit lives and the environment.
