I started with a clean slate – 140+ acres of thick forest that had been virtually untouched for 15-20 years and which had been slated for conservation for some time. The land is not good for farming: very hilly with lots of gullies, poor soil, but also with a huge variety of trees, shrubs, and small to medium wild animals (such as the elephant shrew and dik-dik). I was the first person working on the ground to establish the Wild Living Resources Conservancy and was given a 25,000 Euro budget, which Rob had successfully won through a Dutch grant, with which to establish a successful eco-charcoal business and conduct one training session on the technology of eco charcoal. I was given the budget and the green light to start ~11JUN2007, and told that we were committed to the Dutch to have the business established by OCT-NOV2007 and to have our first training session for rural farmers in DEC2007…let’s just say that my days have been very busy…As of late June, I hired 5 Kenyan employees, having worked through a rather new and strange interviewing process, and am painfully learning that US managerial and business techniques are not exactly applicable here in Kenya. Since then, I lost/fired my askari (night watchman) which I had hired through the auspices of a security company. There is a lot to tell here, but I basically allowed myself to get played by the head of security at the Kilifi Farm Plantation, in return for a night watchman (unclear how many nights he was actually there) and an on-call day guard. Since we were trying to guard 140+ acres of trees from locals cutting half a dozen poles here and there for building, I was not putting a lot of energy into our security, but was mainly trying to create a presence. Instead, I wanted to focus on grassroots education by stopping people and talking to them when they were on or near our land collecting firewood. I am still sort of battling the guys who sneak through the semi-repaired fence, past the “Conservation Area” signs, and knowingly steal trees… Those guys I want to educate differently! Meanwhile, I am looking for an askari that is not afraid to hang out in the forest all night, in the dark, by himself …
I am now extremely fortunate to have a solid core team of 3 kasuals (Swahili for day laborer) on the ground (I had a 4th, but she is too sick to work) and we really are starting to communicate better as we constantly learn from each other. I have finally assigned a great supervisor (Sarah) and have gotten to the point where I do not need to be in the field every single day (they work 6 days a week), but instead check up on them and give directions through Sarah. For the first 5 weeks we have been clearing small paths so that we can actually walk around and get a lay of the land, trying to figure out where to possibly put the charcoal briquetting HQ, and evaluate whether or not we can make access for a 4WD vehicle. This meant lots of crawling around on my hands and knees, through swarms of stinging safari ants, stepping on 1” hardwood thorns, and getting lots of scratches from thorn bushes and blisters from my penga (bush machete). I felt like Indian Jones, when I would finally stand up in a clearing after 50 minutes of crawling, select a small tree to whittle with my penga, then tie the GPS unit to the end using bark strips and raise the GPS as high as I could through the short canopy in hopes of recording the path I was taking! We were constantly finding artifacts, too, like dik-dik skulls, porcupine quills, and old wire traps the locals set for the bush pigs 10 years earlier. I would then work my way back to the team and explain to them the path I wanted them to clear the next day…it was a lot of hands on work for me because I really wanted to minimize and focus our impact on this untouched forest, rather than let 3-4 locals loose with pengas (it’s a conservancy, remember!). Since appointing Sarah as the supervisor and educating the team on what we were doing, I have finally been able to step back and focus on the charcoaling and briquetting process.
For the last couple of weeks, we have begun testing a 55 gallon drum charcoal kiln design and are starting to learn what to do and what not to do in order to maximize our charcoal output (4 tries down so far…). I also found a manual biomass briquette press design online and worked with a carpenter to build my first test press! It sounds rather simple in hindsight, but realize that my internet access is through my cell phone (read: old school dial up speeds) and that I had to teach the local carpenters how to properly use a square and how to properly sharpen their tools with a metal file (these guys even came highly recommended and had built some decent office furniture…). For two weeks, I just kept reminding myself that I was capacity building…I should probably back up a little - what is eco-charcoal you ask? In Africa, most rural people cook either over an open fire (made with firewood they spend 4-6 hours per day gathering) or in a jiko (small metal stove) using charcoal. Both fuels come from the highly NON-sustainable cutting of wood and is one of the major reasons that Kenya has gone from ~30% forest coverage to <5% in the last ~20 years (rough numbers that I have heard from several sources, but it gives you an idea of how bad the deforestation problem is). Charcoal itself is preferable as a fuel to most rural people with an income (but still without running water or electricity) because it is light for transport, it does not smoke, and it is very cheap. However, the charcoal industry is NON-sustainable and extremely inefficient (from a wood usage standpoint) as locals make most of it in small batches – i.e., there is no actual industry. It is usually made by clear-cutting trees illegally and charcoaling green wood in inefficient earth-mound kilns. The result is much less energy from the wood than is possible and a degraded environment, i.e. rampant deforestation. Rather than trying to convert everyone from charcoal to another sustainable or more efficient fuel, I quickly realized that a more realistic thing is to address the current usage of wood, either with better charcoal and/or with better stoves.
The sustainable eco-charcoal idea we are developing is to carbonize the small, fast growing, hardwood shrubs, and to combine the small bits of resulting charcoal with charcoal dust, some coconut husk waste, and a binder, which we then press into briquettes. Each of these small briquettes will (ideally) burn as well or better than a big chunk of high-grade hardwood charcoal! Many NGOs have already developed basic biomass briquettes in South America, Africa, and India using everything from recycled paper, dried cow dung, composted leaves and even charcoal dust, but we have not yet found anyone using actual charcoal…As part of the project I will establish sustainable shrub take-off quotas for a given area of land, so that it can constantly be used as a fuel source, and develop a specific charcoaling and briquette making process that not only is profitable, but also that we can teach to locals as another way for them to profit from preserving the environment and their land. In the end of course, if we cannot make eco-charcoal into a profitable business ourselves, why teach rural Kenyans how to do it!?
So far, everyone I have talked to is very excited about the idea and cannot wait to buy the environmentally friendly charcoal – I just hope we can keep up with the demand sustainably. As someone to whom I explained the idea framed it, “I hope that (we) are not so successful that all of Africa’s shrubs disappear, too!”
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