Lifeline has set up a production center in Northern Uganda with the capacity to produce more than 1,000 Okelo Kuc stoves each month and will soon complete a second center in Kampala that will be able to produce many more.
Lifeline has since fostered a vibrant commercial market for these stove through a concerted advertising campaign and the creation of a sales force of some three dozen female micro-entrepreneurs who it has set up as stove vendors.
In short, Lifeline’ s FES program is building local capacity – creating jobs for skilled laborers and independent women vendors while, at the same time, improving the health and livelihoods of their customers.
The story of Betty Wilobo
One of Lifeline’s first female stove vendors and a shining example of how microenterprise and fuel-efficient stoves can benefit individuals and communities:
Betty Wilobo lives in Lira, Uganda, a large town in Northern Uganda that has been deeply impacted by the twenty-year conflict waged by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebellion that displaced nearly two million people. In 2008 as communities in the region began to recover and people began to return to their homes, Betty was working as a tailor in Lira, earning only a few dollars a day. With these few dollars Betty supported herself, her own three children, and two other children of relatives who had not survived the conflict. Betty herself lost her husband during the conflict, and was caring for the five children on her own.
In October of 2008 Lifeline staff approached Betty and a number of other women in Lira about trying the fuel-efficient stoves. The goal was to gain feedback from the stoves’ intended users before they were released on a large scale in the community. After receiving positive feedback from Betty and the other women about the performance of the stoves, Lifeline staff asked Betty to sell the stoves in her shop, and she agreed. Initially, she would walk the streets of Lira with a stove balanced on her head, answering questions about the stove and selling her stoves to interested customers, many of whom bought the stove from her on the spot. Initially Lifeline would give the stoves to Betty on credit, but quickly Betty earned enough money from stove sales to buy the stoves from Lifeline at cost and then sell them in the community for a profit. In one day alone during her first year as a vendor Betty sold 180 stoves to the Ministry of Forestry. Within one year of selling stoves Betty had earned enough money to send all five children to school.
Today Betty continues to serve as a stove vendor, along with eleven other women and thirteen men. The success that Betty has seen and the success of Lifeline’s microenterprise program lays in the fact that Betty and her fellow vendors are able to improve their own lives with a simple, cost-effective solution that also benefits the other members of their communities. Betty and the other vendors have been able to provide financial security for themselves while ensuring that their communities have access to clean cooking, for life.