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Empowering Rural Africa: Biochar
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Empowering Rural Africa: Biochar
Charles Fraser, thank y...
The Pitch:
The world population is on the rise, expected to peak from 6.8bn today to 9.2bn in 2050 (United Nations forecasts), but at the same time we are degrading most of our soils, cutting down forest for agricultural use, increasing farm waste and destroying soils with CO2 emissions... Therefore the challenge of a growing population coupled with less fertile land (land degradation) is everyone’s problem.
Let’s now start by helping Africa in a sustainable way. If we mass-produce a low-cost cooker or stove that would generate biochar while used by villagers for cooking, solely using agricultural waste. This would avoid cutting trees for fuel. The biochar produced could then be added to soils as fertilizer. And this whole system would create a financial, social, and environmental win-win situation.
How is that possible? Biochar is, in fact, a charcoal produced from carbon-rich material, which releases energy-rich gases, that can then be converted into fuel. It is proved to enhance soil fertility while reducing greenhouse emissions; hence it can be used as a high-quality fertilizer or even as fuel when necessary. It doesn’t necessarily need expensive equipment nor highly-skilled people; the cookers can even be built using local material and workforce.
Introducing this technique to Africa will entail numerous positive effects among which:
- Decreasing the rate of population below poverty line (ex: 70% below poverty line in Nigeria)
- Boosting agricultural outputs thanks to soil fertilization (ex: 70% of labor force in Nigeria stems from agriculture)
- Helping urban planning: counterurbanisation in order to fight against rural desertification (ex: 4% rate of urbanization in Nigeria)
- Creating local agricultural economies in order to decrease the country’s economy imbalance and diversify the countries’ economy away from its overdependence on their capital (ex: 80% of Nigerian GDP in 2000 stemming from Lagos)
In order for villagers in Africa to implement this technique, 3 major steps need to be taken:
- The Villagers need to acquire these low-cost cookers
- They need to understand that biochar increases soil fertility in order to effectively use the cookers they will receive
- Then they need to trade the biochar produced, which could then be our job to manage
How can we implement that technique? We need to start locally in one country then generalize the model to Africa, just like the “waterfall” principle. We would first work in Nigerian villages then in neighbor countries, being able to use Nigeria as a successful example.
Financing this social and environmental project, our “green idea to change the world”, can be done through government sponsorship, local authorities, banks/multinational firms involved with environment-friendly or charity work. If carbon trading allows biochar as a valid carbon trade, then one can also work a shared profit with villagers in the long run.
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