Inyenyeri is a start-up Rwandan Energy Company seeking to deliver biomass fuel pellets for cooking to millions of rural and urban households throughout East and Central Africa. The Mission is to get Rwandan households to cook with clean and renewable energy.
Inyenyeri's business model is designed to lure households away from cooking with wood and charcoal by providing clean and renewable fuel that cooks better and is more affordable. Inyenyeri provides free fanned micro-gasifying cookstoves to all customers, and accepts payment in the form of cash or as bundles of biomass. This allows all customers, rich and poor, urban and rural, to access Inyenyeri's clean cooking energy.
Contact Information
Our Focus
Charcoal sales in Rwanda are projected to exceed $500 million by 2017. By that time, Inyenyeri aims to capture a significant market share, now held by the artisanal charcoal industry, with a lower cost and cleaner burning product that eliminates deforestation as a part of cooking fuel. The Company expects to profitably serve 1.7 million Rwandans (13% of households) with $77 million in revenues by 2017.
Our Experience And Interest In The Four PCIA Central Focus Areas
Rwandans are generally so poor that they place a higher value on finding the cheapest way to cook food in spite of the social and environmental costs. Urban households use charcoal because it is the cheapest fuel available in cities. Rural households burn raw biomass because they can collect it for free. Better cookstoves or cooking fuels cost money that poor households simply don’t have.
This is a “razor-razorblade” business model. Cookstoves are like “razors” - they require a fuel for functionality. Fuel pellets are our “razorblades” - they are purchased repeatedly and used every day. Inyenyeri’s fuel pellets are only useful at the household level when burned in a micro-gasifying cookstove (other revenue streams will be developed selling pellets to fuel boilers, kilns, and for other industrial/agricultural uses currently met by burning trees).
Rwanda currently lacks a market for fuel pellets as gasifying cookstoves are not manufactured, nor have been introduced, in the country prior to Inyenyeri. In order to create a market to sell fuel pellets, Inyenyeri will place Company-owned gasifying cookstoves in households that choose to enter into a Fuel Supply / Service Agreement. A draft of this contract has been tested successfully by the company.
The fuel pellets are made from a mixture of the same plants that currently are collected and burned by most rural Rwandan households. Timber wood and tree branches are not used in the mixture, therefore no trees are cut to make the pellets.
Inyenyeri will conduct extensive monitoring of indoor air quality through randomized control trials.
Relevant Publications or Studies
none.
Our Contribution to the Partnership
Inyenyeri would like to participate in the Partnership as a fuel producer and supplier that is on the cutting edge of a new fuel-based business model which can subsidize the cost of clean cookstoves.
