Dar es Salaam, TZ – Cooking with biogas saves trees – 31 Jul 2013

The Malaika Kids Children’s Village is south of Dar es Salaam, and provides safe and secure accommodation for vulnerable children who find themselves alone on the streets of Dar es Salaam.

A pilot initiative successfully demonstrated the potential to replace the use of charcoal for cooking with renewable fuels through installation of a bio-digester that converts the kitchen and household waste into biogas.  The benefits are reduced cost, less use of wood, and less harmful smoke in the kitchen, making it an environmental and also health friendly project.

Putting kitchen scraps into the bio-digester

Malaika Kids has now implemented a bio-digester project with two GESI2000 digesters and a twin burner gas stove. Initially they had some teething problems, but the installation is now working well: the housemothers use the twin burner gas stove every day for cooking, and the bio-digesters produces a steady stream of biogas. All investments (as per the original investment plan) have been made, the installation works well.

Cooking with biogas

The issue is that the capacity at the moment is not sufficient to do all the cooking for the 65 children and 12 adults in the Children’s Village on biogas, so the team has been working with SimGas to investigate the best way to increase capacity.