Daniel Ayieko Odongo sits relaxed with a bucket brimming with fuel briquettes; the energy product that’s helped him, a former CD seller, rise up in the world, is helping others access more affordable fuel and – in the long run – may reduce pressure on Kenya’s forests.

We’d spent a week together in the town of Ranen, learning how he and others produce this fuel, visiting his customers and suppliers and getting to know how people around use energy in their lives. Daniel was also eager to share how the DEEP-EA programme has influenced their success.

Ranen Market is in the heart of a green and fertile belt of land - Kenya’s bread-basket - close to Lake Victoria. People use a mixture of fuels for cooking and heating; those in rural areas mostly collect firewood, those in the market towns tend to use a combination of charcoal (derived from firewood) and the fossil fuel, kerosene.

But Daniel knows this is coming at an ecological price: “you see the environment in Kenya is not good, the environment is important even for local people, that is why we talk about this new method of cooking”.

Briquettes are made by consolidating/compacting a stock of combustible material, commonly agricultural or forestry waste. Daniel began by collecting piles of ‘charcoal dust’, pieces of charcoal too small for consumers to use (yet making up to 10-20% of all charcoal sold) and turning this into an affordable fuel.

“We were told how to do it by hand and we started with the little money we were having; we could not wait for pressing machines”. The charcoal dust is simply mixed with locally available clay, moulded into balls and left to dry in the sun for 3 days.

The resulting product is a winner with consumers who are getting frustrated with rising charcoal prices. David Odindi, who runs a small hotel in town, says: “there’s no smoke, the price is cheap and it doesn’t smell”.

It didn’t take long for sales to pick up. “When I first went to the market in June I went with half a bag and I came back with a quarter. People were just taking them like this saying what are they? I was not discouraged, as people come to know about it, sales went up. Now even if I take two bags to market I sell them all”

For Daniel the key stimulus was a mentoring session he had some months after initial Business Development Skills training: “Before, it was just hand-to-mouth business. We make we sell we eat. But I found out the business and I are two different things altogether, which means I can respect my business more than I can respect myself’

His production is now up to over half a tonne of briquettes per week. And he is able to earn almost as much as a teacher would - up to $300 monthly – a hand-to-mouth business no longer.

There are now three like producers in town (all trained under GVEP International’s Developing Energy Enterprises Programme in East Africa, DEEP-EA) and their only problem seems to be getting enough of the dust: “Now the competition has started we have to go even to Awendo to take it”

Daniel recognises that in the long-term they cannot afford to be reliant on charcoal production, a practice that has caused widespread deforestation in Kenya and now regulated by the government “The charcoal will sometime diminish, we are seeing in the near future we want to use bagasse [sugar cane waste]. Carbonise it, and first make it locally with our hands” We had a chance to visit nearby South Nyanza Sugar Factory and the amount of bagasse piling up everyday really is huge – perhaps enough to serve 500,000 people. Daniel and others have plans to invest in machinery to increase production and the race is on to be the first to turn this into a useful product.

Daniel, who used to earn a living selling CDs, has already seen his income increase considerably and feels a real change: “people have been coming to us because they have seen what we have done. Now they are seeing our life has changed after DEEP-EA and we ourselves inwardly know it too.”

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