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Living Sustainably
Empowering households with clean cooking stove technologies
Burning biomass fuels results in smoke emissions which kill an estimated 4 million people in poorly ventilated kitchens, especially in poor rural communities.
This negatively affects the planet, resulting in a rise in global warming as well as potentially causing substantial land degradation. Opportunities for change exist through the use of clean cook stoves which provide solutions to these adverse effects of inefficient cooking devices and cooking methods.
Recognizing the essence of a healthy environment, Access Bank in 2018 partnered with SME Funds to develop the Green Social Entrepreneurship program. This program empowered over 200 entrepreneurs with clean cooking stove technologies which make it economically feasible to convert waste-based biomass to fuel,
replacing existing cooking technologies which are harmful to health and environment.
Taking this a notch further, the Bank enhanced its response to tackling climate change as well as empowering communities through the introduction of the Access Bank Family Clean Cooking Support Programme. This initiative aims to provide clean cooking stove technologies and biofuels to select households across communities in Nigeria in order to meet their basic needs following the recent COVID-19 pandemic which has negatively impacted the economy, resulting in increased hardships and livelihoods with limited alternatives.
Households in states most affected by the virus in Nigeria have begun to experience challenges with means of survival and meeting their physiological needs- food, clothing and shelter. Most especially, households with the basic physiological need such as foods are faced with challenges of high cost of cooking technologies to process raw food items into consumable food. Through this initiative, the Bank has distributed more than 5,000 liters of biofuels to support over 2,500 families and reached over 900 small business owners during the COVID-19 lock down. This has also resulted in daily savings of N1300 per family and eliminated 8,000tons of carbon emissions which would have emanated from the use of unhealthy cooking equipment.
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