Cookstoves for farmers good for spice trade, too

What would it look like if each company in the industrialized world with a significant business stake in a developing country took an interest in the well-being of the communities that helped it turn a profit?

One model might look like the emerging collaboration between Rodelle Inc., the 75-year-old Fort Collins-based producer of some of the finest vanilla extract in the world; the Uganda Vanilla Growers Association, a top exporter from which Rodelle buys its beans; and Trees, Water & People, a Fort Collins-based nonprofit organization dedicated to “helping communities to protect, conserve and manage the natural resources upon which their long-term well-being depends.”

What does that collaboration plan to do? Create a fuel-efficient cookstove program for the Ugandan farmers who grow and harvest the vanilla beans.

And what do cookstoves have to do with vanilla extract? Nothing directly. But replacing a smoky, fuel-wasting stove with one that makes efficient use of fuel and is virtually smoke-free directly – and measurably – improves a family’s health. A stove with an internal combustion chamber has the additional economic appeal of saving the user time – by reducing wood gathering – and money – by reducing fuel costs.

The collaboration is in the early stages of determining just what a Ugandan woman in the Bugonia District might want in her kitchen. The effort began at a 2010 fundraiser benefiting the Haitian Education Leadership Program, Partners in Health, and TWP, organized by returned Peace Corps volunteers Melissa and Joe Basta. Melissa had served in Haiti; Joe in the Dominican Republic. Joe also happens to be one of the partners in Rodelle, a company that had made sustainability a working part of its culture.

“We believe that taking care of our communities and our environment means we’re taking care of each other,” Joe Basta said. “That’s why we take an active role in programs that improve social and environmental standards in communities where we live and work.”

Indeed, Rodelle’s facility is wind-powered and the company is a Silver Level Partner with the city of Fort Collins’ Climate Wise program. Rodelle’s environmental efforts have reduced greenhouse-gas emissions, increased energy efficiency and decreased waste. Therefore, it is no surprise that TWP’s Central American stove program, which since 1998 has built nearly 40,000 Rocket Stoves, caught Basta’s attention. What if such a program could be started in Uganda, one of the principal sources of his company’s product?

Culturally coherent

The co-founders of TWP, Richard Fox and Stuart Conway – another returned Peace Corps volunteer – thought it was a splendid idea, and one that TWP was uniquely equipped to facilitate. Sebastian Africano, deputy international director for TWP, knows a thing or two about fuel-efficient, culturally coherent cookstoves. He was trained as a Rocket Stove consultant by the Oregon-based Aprovecho Research Center, and has worked as an environmental adviser to the International Lifeline Fund, which has its own stove project in Sudan, Uganda and Kenya.

Both the partners at Rodelle and those at TWP knew from experience that having a sponsor and an expert are necessary to create a development project. But for a program to carry on under its own steam when the sponsor and the expert are long gone, local buy-in – both management and interest – must be in place from the beginning.

So there will also be two local players. The local partner is the UVAN. The growers’ association pays a premium for vanilla beans and provides farmers and their families with extension services in health, livelihoods and environment. A small non-governmental organization already at work in Uganda – such as Joint Energy Environment Projects – will most likely be used to launch the stoves project.

Then there are the women who will actually be using the stoves. Their consent to have their lives “improved” is essential.

“People don’t often think about the fact that cookstoves vary according to culture,´ said Claudia Menendez, international program coordinator for TWP. “But in the Americas, people like to cook standing over an open flame and might only use a cookstove once a week for making up a pot of beans. In Uganda, the stoves look completely different.”

She added that for this project, the first step was to go into the kitchens to see what was being used and then to let the women try out some different stoves to see what they liked.

Earlier this month, in the company of Rodelle partners Joe Basta and Dan Berlin, Africano conducted a focus group with 36 women, five stoves, and 50 eggs donated by Aga Sekalala, founder of UVAN.

And the winner was?

Not so fast. Before this project launches – probably after the vanilla bean harvest at the end of the summer – the partners have much to discuss. How will the various Rocket Stove options be manufactured? Transported? Installed? Monitored? Evaluated?

Creating a sustainable stove program will take some time and will not be easy, but if done with care it will do long-term good for the UVAN farmers.

Good for business

It will also be good for a Fort Collins business. It is one thing to claim “social responsibility” and another to do something lasting. Critics point out that lots of multi-national companies create facades of caring with little investment behind them. As long as a company like Rodelle wants to grow and prosper for another 75 years, producing everything from an organic line of products to Costco’s store brand vanilla, it needs to be operating in an environment that is also growing and prospering.

Then there are the geopolitical issues that roil countries on the African continent on a regular basis. With this single project, Rodelle builds human relationships from the ground up, from the smallholder Ugandan vanilla growers and their households to the local producer associations and UVAN, the exporter.

Such relationships are particularly important in the vanilla trade, because it literally takes a village to raise a bean. Vanilla is the second most labor-intensive spice in the world to produce – beat out only by saffron – because every step in cultivation, from pollination to harvest, must be done by hand. So having a healthy, prosperous workforce that feels respected is no small matter. In 2009, riots in Madagascar – where Rodelle maintains a good reputation for supporting families on the island’s “vanilla coast” – sent a shiver through the global market.

If it is true that the local and global economies are now inextricably entwined, then smart money bets on a business model that recognizes the connections between sustainability and profitability – with a dash of human kindness added for good measure.

The Third Goal of the Peace Corps, set down in 1961, is to “contribute to the education of America and to more intelligent American participation in the world.” Here in the organization’s 50th year, it appears that Rodelle and TWP are helping to meet that goal.

Jane Albritton is a contributing writer for the Northern Colorado Business Report. She can be contacted at jane@tigerworks.com.

on Facebook on LinkedIn