Empowering Women’s Groups in Malawi for Clean Energy Cooking

By George Foden, Loughborough University

Solar4Africa started life in 2015 as a small social enterprise in Malawi, aiming to explore the potential opportunities for the use of solar energy across the country. Solar4Africa developed its solar work in Malawi in partnership with a local Malawian company called Kachione LLC. Founders Bereket Lebassi Habtezion and Robert Van Buskirk in collaboration with Laurence Kachione of Kachione LLC, quickly established that the key to securing uptake of solar electricity would be to reduce the cost associated with PV panels, batteries, and other tools to make it accessible to Malawians who often survive off of less than $1/person/day. Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world, and even a good solution can prove too expensive for people in rural areas who mostly survive on piecework and subsistence farming.

I heard Robert talk at Loughborough University in March, where he explained how the introduction of clean cooking can reduce the cost of electricity for rural Malawians. The first step was to increase the uptake of more fuel-efficient electric pressure cookers in Malawi, which could run directly on the power generated from household solar panels. Then, because the cooker is less expensive than the solar panels, any cost decrease that can be obtained for the solar panels results in a significant cost decline for the off-grid electric cooking system. This means that as the international wholesale cost of a 300W solar panel has recently declined below $50, a simple “panel plus cooker” off-grid cooking system begins to be affordable to Malawians who have an average per-capita income of $645 per year in 2022. Solar4Africa and Kachione have worked to create cheaper solar systems for household use, focusing on improving the durability of batteries, and creating a new battery that can last much longer than current majority practice, theoretically up to twenty years. Such an improvement in performance increases affordability; however, one key aspect of the programme was still needed. What incentives are there to invest in a solar system for clean cooking in poor rural areas of Malawi?

The answer was not one that could be answered by Solar4Africa or Kachione alone. It sat within the communities they were working with.

In July of 2021, Solar4Africa and Kachione LLC began exploring how to set up village solar shops that could act as rural centres for promoting the solar cookers, solar pumps and solar lights. Initial efforts were focused in two areas, Lundu located in the rural areas of Blantyre district, and Mgubo, a village in Mchinji District.

In Lundu, the shop was established by a local women’s collective that had earlier distributed solar lights for Kachione LLC.  The women in Lundu expressed a strong interest in business opportunities, so the initial activities were renting solar pumping systems and selling discounted solar cooking systems and solar panels. In Mgubo, there was a lot of interest from the local village chief, and a local entrepreneur who was willing to set up a solar shop using Kachione’s approach.

As construction of the first solar shop in Mgubo was underway, the village chief was tasked with organising a women’s group to run the shop. At the same time, solar pumping systems were distributed to women’s groups in neighbouring villages.

In Mgubo, the solar pumps wound up being very popular and useful, and it was demonstrated that when local women’s groups received solar pumps, their gardening activities benefitted tremendously. But Mgubo never organized a women’s group to run the local shop, and the men running the program sold off their stock of solar panels in order to earn profits from the sales commissions. The Mgubo group maintained little interest in cookers and appeared more interested in getting and selling solar pumps to individual male farmers rather than supporting women’s gardening groups.

In Lundu, in contrast, the women’s collective maintained the local shop as a local solar resource for the community. They rented solar pumping systems to near-by farmers for about $1 per day, solar panels with cookers, and sold solar lighting systems. To this day, three years later, the Lundu shop is still operating.  

Robert would later explain that the key to success for Kachione’s model was in prioritising sustainability over short-term business growth, and for that the approach required a re-focusing of efforts in engaging community women’s groups and putting them in charge of the operation of the business. Reflecting on the growth of Kachione’s business model after the initial trial in Mgubo, in an interview in April 2024, Robert explained:

Men, typically, deal within the larger economy and are more accustomed to a short-term business context. Women have to make the household work, and often only have as much money as the men will give them, so they have much more experience of building social networks to help each other out. [We realised that] the shops that were being run by women would be much more effective than if they run through the usual “business leaders” in communities, because the networks are already built, and they are much more cooperative and responsive to community needs.

By May of 2023, Kachione had set up about a dozen women’s groups and were running multiple shops supplying solar irrigation systems and electric cookers across many districts in Malawi. Women’s groups that were proving most effective at earning income with the solar pumps were prioritised for receiving discounted electric cookers, and these businesses continued to grow. In a presentation at Loughborough University in April 2024, Robert demonstrated the ways that this approach impacted outcomes for the women’s groups:

More women-led businesses continue to be opened up across Malawi, and the plan for 2025 is to test the replicability of this approach at a much larger scale. The aim is to create a network of 200 – 300 solar shops by the end of 2025, with the distribution of >10,000 electric pressure cookers through this model. Current trends are showing a strong appetite for Kachione’s solar systems across the country, and Solar4Africa is committed to supporting this continued growth in the coming years. We look forward to seeing how this project continues to develop and scale up in the future.