Bio-briquettes

At Danish Refugee Council, we work to give refugees access to alternative and more sustainable energy sources. Bio-briquettes are one of them!

Bio-briquettes solve two major challenges

In Tanzania, refugees and host communities rely on firewood for cooking. As a result, for many years, children and adults have naturally gone to the forest to cut down trees, which they have chopped up and carried home with great difficulty.

Tree felling not only puts a strain on families, but also on the climate they live in. In addition, the journey to and from the forest is highly risky for girls and women, who are at risk of sexual assault along the way.

Danish Refugee Council has therefore introduced a solution to make this tree felling unnecessary. Namely bio briquettes!

Climate: Bio-briquettes are made from leftover waste

Bio-briquettes are used for cooking in the family kitchen - as a sustainable and much more climate-friendly alternative to regular firewood.

The briquettes are made from residual biological waste. This can be coffee bean shells, plant leaves or leftover corn cobs - not dissimilar to the contents of your compost bucket at home.

By heating this residual waste in special metal drums, you create a biomass that can eventually be pressed into bio-briquettes - either by machine or manually using the right tools, which Danish Refugee Council distributes to refugee families.

Bio-briquettes have several great advantages: they burn longer, better and produce less smoke than conventional firewood.

16,000 families receive ready-made bio-briquettes - others produce them at home

The majority of our bio-briquettes are made in our own production units. Here we train refugees to produce biomass and make the briquettes on machines.

Once the bio-briquettes are fully dried, we pack them in 50 kg bags and distribute them to particularly vulnerable refugee families in the camp. At the time of writing, 16,000 households receive ready-made bio-briquettes every month.

In addition to the direct distribution of ready-made bio-briquettes, we also distribute tools so that refugee families can make the briquettes themselves at home. In this way, we reach many more people with a climate-friendly firewood alternative.

It means a lot to me to be part of this project. I've learned a whole new way of sourcing climate-friendly firewood and I take pride in spreading the message to others.

Emily Nzoisenga, refugee and bio-briquette producer