ECOBORA COMPANY

I look forward to use the use Elevate prize to increase my leadership acumen, explore pathways to impact rural marginalized schools in Kenya and beyond, engage in multi-stakeholder networking opportunities in the MIT ecosystem. I will get to challenge and reflect on my entrepreneurial journey, rethink their future leadership and get to renew my commitment to building Ecobora to a national entity serving Kenyan schools.

We shall rebrand our business, better communicate to our stakeholders and partners. We shall also carry out an aggressive marketing campaign targeting schools by going through paid exhibitions like the annual teachers conference so that we can increase the number of schools to 5000 by 2024.

We shall apply for tier 7 stove certificates from KEBS and KIRID Kenya as make of quality of our stoves. This will allow us to begin serving customers outside Kenya.

We shall capacity build our fabricators who have been licensed to improve efficiency in their production facilities and introduce quality and strengthen their distribution channels.

Lastly we shall offer growth opportunities to Ecobora staff where we plan to attend energy and investment forums in and hire an energy auditors and engineers to support our growth for the next years.

 Mr. Justine Nyaruri Abuga is an award winning social impact entrepreneur. He is the C.E.O and Founder of Ecobora Company (www.ecobora.co.ke), the first green energy company that is offering African schools with solar cooking stoves and saving them 100% firewood costs. He is using green energy as a catalyst for poverty alleviation and their mission is to build resilient and empowered communities that can thrive. Due to their impact vested work, Mr. Justine Abuga has received severally awards and prizes including recognition from USADF, USADI AND Tony Elumelu foundation. He has attended several entrepreneurship boot camps and training including Young African Leadership Initiative (YALI) flagged by President Barrack Obama. He has 7 years’ experience working in the green energy space and he is a believer status quo disruption using innovation, technology and sustainability with passion of working with rural marginalized women and youths towards realizing their economic potential. My goal is to impact 1 million lives using green energy as a catalyst for poverty a in Africa.

378,000 rural marginalized schools in Kenya use firewood to cook their meals. 22,000 schools in Nyamira use firewood spending $10,000 annually which is expensive and accompanied with a lot of smoke. With the Kenyan government ban in logging, the cost of purchasing firewood has doubled forcing schools to increase their tuition fee. Since most of these parents live below $2 a day, they cannot afford the increased fee leading to 342,300 students dropping annually Out of schools in Kenya.

650,000 students in Kenya alone are forced to miss meals in school as they cannot afford to pay increased cooking fees https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/nutrition-crisis-deepening-across-kenya

Ecobora offers solar cook stove to rural marginalized schools in Kenya to cook food for their students eliminating 100% use of firewood.

We also train community members who in turn offer installation, repair and maintenance services to this schools and thus by partnering with already existing fabricators, we are creating jobs and entrepreneurs.

 By offering this rural underserved schools with affordable clean cooking energy, we are saving them $10,000 per year-money that could be spent to purchase firewood- and now the schools are building learning infrastructure like libraries and science labs in quest to offer quality education to students.

Our technology uses special solar collectors which have an 83% energy conversion efficiency compared to solar heating systems of 23% efficiency. This allows us to generate enough thermal energy for heavy commercial users like schools and factories-which are the best consumers of firewood.

Our stoves eliminates the use of firewood by 100% since we have a repurposed oil storage tank that stores the heat energy until need arises unlike the convention boilers that rely 100% on firewood and thus without technology we shall enable schools to cut their cooking cost by $10,000 per year.

Our technology comprises of thermosiphon tubes which we have patented that have been engineered in a special way to transfer heat energy from the solar collectors to the oil tank and to the cooking points with minimal heat loss-this is the backbone of our innovation that is giving us an edge as we have cracked down how to transport and store thermal energy.

Lastly the stove is fitted with sensors that relay information to the cooks and operators on any leakages, amount of energy converted, amount of energy used, energy deficit, time to cook ad even emission levels and thus generating crucial energy data sets.

We are working together with rural schools and their communities to manufacture and install solar cooking boilers to replace the expensive firewood boilers. To date we have used our solar boilers to support these communities why we have had made a huge impact. We want to grow this impact and to date we have successfully supported more than 123 rural schools in Nyamira are now using our solar stoves which have enabled them to save $9920 per year per school. With these, more than 85,000 students have been able to access meals in schools and reduced the school dropout rates in these schools by 75%. The money the school saves has been used to build 6 libraries, 13 computer labs and directed towards improving the education of the students. We have supported 12 stove fabricators and created 36 job opportunities to women and youths. We have saved 275,250 tons of trees from being converted into firewood to provide energy in these kitchens and these has resulted to a reduction of 30 tonnes CO2e emissions PER SCHOOL.

By working close with these communities we are uplifting rural marginalized and under-funded schools in Kenya out of energy poverty.