The Problem
Our clubs wish is to enable children realize their full potential to being changing agents in our community by addressing climate change INTRODUCTION Sustainable sources of wood fuel have diminished. Many poor families’ household budgets suffer from domestic energy expenses. Deforestation has become a worldwide epidemic due to poverty, pressures of population growth, and low innovations in the clean energy sector and so on. The project intends to establish a very useful model to compress recycled materials such as paper, cardboard, sawdust, soil and organic waste, to make fuel for cooking, which is equal or superior to charcoal. The resultant briquettes are also cost-effective and can be made to produce less smoke, thus being beneficial in terms of human health. As per experience, we have realized that briquettes to be more effective, energy saving cooking stoves are required. PROCESS: Briquette is a new innovation alternative source of cooking fuel that can be used both domestic and in small scale industries. Briquette is made from waste products (coffee, rice husks, banana peels, charcoal dust, and sawdust) –the waste ground and the products mixed with water in various proportions. The pellets are then granulated using locally fabricated moulds before being left to dry on the sun and then packaged. Apparently, grass-root people especially marginalized children of Kisanga Primary School find it difficult to start a new initiative for self-help, without mobilizing for external support to spring board activities. The briquette project will assist the rural community by providing an alternative source of fuel to substitute wood fuel. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES OF THE PROJECT • To reduce environmental pollution by converting agro-waste into smokeless Briquette charcoal fuel to ensure young children’s health care • Develop cheap cooking fuel to substitute charcoal/wood fuel that is contributing to environmental degradation • To create income generating activity for children's parents through sale of surplus Briquette charcoal pellets produced to enable them provide school fees to their vulnerable children and other basic needs. . To plant 3000 trees in along the degraded areas heading to Kisanga Primary school by establishing a school seed nursery bed. This will help address climate change as well as protect the forests in the neighborhood for children to continue learning from The project will enact skills to children at the school in making briquette pellets and enable them be changing agents in their families as they influence their parents to take over briquette making initiative that will stop the community people from encroaching on the national park .i.e. Queen Elizabeth and Mt. Rwenzori National Parks in search of firewood. PROJECT ACTIVITIES 1. Research and introduce briquette for use both at households and small-scale industries to solve the ever-soaring prices and shortages of other fuel sources. 2. Training and equip rural communities especially women and women groups with skills of making briquette charcoal pellets as an affordable cooking fuel sources. 3. To establish a rural small scale factory to produce briquette, while creating employment to the local people and many youth who have just completed high school institutions. ANTICIPATED OUTCOMES/ JUSTIFICATION FOR PROJECT With only 5% of the rural population having access to electricity, more than 90% of the country’s total energy needs in Uganda come from biomass sources. Of this, wood accounts for 80%, charcoal 10% and crop residues at nearly 4%1. The project has the following key benefits:- (a) Energy supply: Renewable energy innovation, switch from fuel-wood to charcoal briquettes from abandoned agro-wastes. (b) Energy demand: Replacement of inefficient existing “household energy” and improvement of energy efficiency. (c). Carbon savings: For every ton of biomass charcoal briquette, about 88 trees with a diameter of about 10 cm is saved from cutting for firewood and charcoal making, which will in turn serve as carbon sink. (d). Livelihood support: New form of skills training for the community creating new form of job and a little supplementary income --- this could be a vehicle for a good social change
