Mukuru Clean Stoves, a social enterprise providing reliable and affordable cook stoves for low income households, has won the 2022 Earthshot Prize.
The company is among five companies that emerged winners of the second-annual awards, walking away with Ksh 152 million in cash prizes.
The awards followed a nine-month long process seeking inspiring and innovative solutions to environmental challenges facing the planet.
Reacting to the win, Mukuru Clean Stoves founder Charlot Magayi noted that the Earthshot Prize will help her reach over one million households.
“It is a great honour to receive this recognition from the Earthshot Prize. In 2017, I set out to help women in Mukuru reduce household air pollution
“5 years later, 200,000 households in Kenya use our stoves and The Earthshot Prize is going to help us reach 1 million households, enabling 5 million people to benefit from cleaner air and putting us so much closer to achieving our goal of eradicating household air pollution,” Magayi said.
She also attributed the win to her team.
“To the Mukuru Clean Stoves team, for your dedication to providing access to better cooking technology and helping clean our air, congratulations! Let us work together to Clean Our Air,” she added.
The company provides affordable cookstoves for low-income households. These stoves have been made by locally-sourced recycled metal and have been distributed through networks of local women business owners and microfinance institutions.
The enterprise has helped foster women’s entrepreneurship, for instance, 100 percent of Mukuru sales agents are women and 85 percent of them live in the communities that they serve.
They also partner with local women-owned businesses to reach their target market.
Clean cookstoves can decrease fuel consumption by 30-60 percent and reduces toxic smoke emissions by 50-90 percent.
