Murang'a: 150, 000 women to get energy-saving jikos

Murang'a County government has commenced a partnership programme that will see 150,000 low-income women empowered to abandon high carbon emitting fuels in their cooking by 2025.

The women will be identified from areas that suffer low forest cover, to protect the few trees there are there, as an elaborate plan is made for reforestation.

County's Water, Irrigation, Environment and Natural Resources Chief Executive Mary Magochi said her department is concerned by high number of families relying on felled trees for kitchen fires.

She spoke while leading issuance of 500 such jikos to women in Kigumo Sub-county on December 21. The programme targeted 5,000 beneficiaries by Christmas day.

Small-scale eateries

She observed that the county is concerned that poor women recruit services of their children to hustle for firewood to a point “some are sexually taken advantage of by men with firewood to offer”.

Ms Magochi said a further 60,000 small-scale eateries run by women entrepreneurs will benefit from the programme.

"The programme specifically targets women as the drivers. They are the fire specialists in families. We want to reduce the frequency of their travel to collect firewood, minimise their workload and expense they incur in purchasing firewood..." she said.

She noted that the programme will reduce disease burden associated with carbon emissions, as families and workers engage in firewood cooking.

“Since it is harder to migrate them to use of liquefied petroleum gases or biogas, we have mooted a grand plan to help them move into energy saving jikos that will consume lower volumes of timber,” she said.y

Water towers

Ms Magochi explained that if the programme bears fruit, “our reliance on cutting trees to get fuel will drop by over 70 per cent, and we can gap the rate of deforestation by planting more trees than we cut.”

She said the county is in the process of mapping out its forests and water towers so that a tree planting programme can be up-scaled.

The county minister said Murang'a is considered a crisis county in afforestation since it has the lowest forest cover at 14.54 per cent, of the five Central region counties. Nyeri has 38.03 per cent, Kirinyaga with 20.6, Nyandarua with 18.44 while Kiambu has 16.55 forest cover.

She explained that the county will partner with manufacturers of the jikos to actualise the programme.

County director of environment John Rukenya said all schools that are still rely on firewood to cook for students "will be encouraged to cease and adopt alternative forms of energy".

Biogas

He said: "We are sensitising those institutions that use high volumes of firewood to scale down consumption by embracing alternative technologies including biogas, brick stones and self-generated electricity".

Ms Magochi said local water and sanitation companies are also being encouraged to use sewer dumpsites to generate alternative fuels.

"If we were to utilise the avenues we have of producing cheaper energies, we can bring down the cost of cooking gas and electricity bills by more than 50 per cent. We only require ideal mind-sets, stakeholders and partnerships," she said.

Ms Magochi said the County government is ready to take charge of the drive saying, "our own Murang'a University has competencies in excess to guide research based programmes towards actualising this energy dream".

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