Meeting the Kisumu Governor

During the project's inception meeting, Greenergia K Ltd, Illumina Africa, Deltares and SNV team members met in Nairobi and Kisumu to kick-start the project.

The partners met with the Kisumu Governor and selection of key government officials. Victor Langenberg from Deltares introduced to the audience how the W2E partners will set up an inclusive water governance framework (IWGF) that allows multi stakeholder engagement, collaborations and dialogues.

The IWGF envisages a long-term engagement and will hold a business model and an innovative communication approach. The business model seeks to scale-up clean cooking and green fuel technologies through a consultative, integrated, enterprise-based approach to local, regional and basin-scale developments. It needs to be adaptive able to consolidate and apply new knowledge from experiences and lessons learned from donor, government, public and private investments in clean cooking solutions. The communication approach promotes enterprise-based, large-scale dissemination and adoption of clean cooking solutions in Kisumu and beyond. By increasing access to modern technologies and cleaner fuels, the approach promotes the alleviation of adverse health, environment, and socio-economic impacts of traditional cooking practices by mostly Kenyan women.

Reinilde Eppinga from SNV and Reena Shah from Greenergia K Ltd proceeded to explain how the W2E project will transform water hyacinth together with other waste into fuel pellets as well as conduct an adoption trial for the pellets and stoves with local communities in Kisumu. Results from the adoption trial will be used to develop fuel-stove combinations tailored to the needs and preferences of the target groups as well as for design of effective marketing strategies to be used by entrepreneurs in the sector.

The stakeholders present then proceeded to form a working group to steer activities that aim for improvement of water health of Lake Victoria.