The story of the American company that produces high-efficiency stoves to reduce environmental impacts and improve living conditions for the poorest communities.
Savings, efficiency and a better quality of life. These are the goals of Envirofit, an American company that has decided to develop and produce small cooking stoves designed for poor communities without access to energy. A business built on the idea that clean technologies must be available to everyone. Envirofit has received the Bloomberg Energy Finance award as one of the "New energy pioneers".
Founded in 2003, Envirofit has dedicated itself to products that would allow even the poorest people to use high-efficiency tools, while respecting the environment. By focusing on cooking methods, the company spent years working to understand the consumption habits and cooking practices of people without access to electricity, ultimately creating and bringing to market high-quality solutions capable of improving quality of life. Envirofit today serves more than five million people across Africa, Asia and Latin America, with more than a dozen products designed on the basis of families' needs.
The technology is calibrated to the needs of people who cannot access energy due to a lack of income or energy infrastructure — the latter being an extremely critical issue for the populations of the poorest countries. Around the world, in 2014, 16.5 per cent of the population had no access to electricity, a decrease of 0.2 per cent compared to 2012. This means that 1.06 billion human beings still live without power: half of them are in sub-Saharan Africa. More than three billion people continue to cook with toxic fuels or inadequate technologies that are dangerous and harmful to health.
Envirofit employs a number of innovations to ensure that food cooks more quickly, reducing the amount of fuel needed to operate the stoves and minimising the production of smoke and toxic emissions as much as possible. The stoves use only 60 per cent of the fuel compared to old cooking systems and reduce toxic emissions by up to 80 per cent. These innovations allow low-income families to make significant savings on an indispensable daily activity such as cooking.
The 1.5 million units sold have an average lifespan of five years and will prevent more than 20 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere, while generating around 165 million dollars in savings for consumers, who often also find employment within the company itself. The development and manufacture of the product have enabled Envirofit to create more than 400 new direct jobs and stimulated a supply chain of a further 1,200 positions.