Fair Biogas in Africa
BiogasUnite represents biogas entrepreneurs working together to ensure a fair market and protect the future of the biogas industry in Africa.
Vision
A fair market led by local entrepreneurs in a protected environment and limited foreign aid involvement.
Mission
Making all existing biogas systems work through a Pan-African biogas customer service offered by the private sector.
Call
Register your biogas system, enter your skills and business data, follow and share, support financially or with contacts.
What is BiogasUnite?
Who is BiogasUnite
We are professionals working to make biogas accessible for people in Africa. African biogas entrepreneurs, international biogas companies, African and international organizations, influencers and activists join forces to make biogas great again.
Why was BiogasUnite founded?
We are enthusiastic about biogas and its potential. It is unbearable to see biogas lagging beind this enormous potential of serving a majority of Africans with a clean, renewable and affordable source of energy. We believe in a private sector driven approach and want to prepare the ground for a fair market development.
What is the aim?
On the African continent there are more than 100.000 biogas systems paid for and installed under National Biogas Programs alone. A large number of these systems are not functional. The main reason is the missing customer service. Our aim is to make all biogas systems on the continent work and to keep them running through a wide net of reliable technical service providers.
What is the benefit?
Biogas systems are an energy and income generating technology that makes life easier for their owners, if they work. Existing, but broken biogas digesters can be repaired with a fraction of the time and money spent on constructing them. The immediate benefit is: 160.000m3 of firewood and 8 million kg of charcoal can be saved within 2 years. In total about 5 million m2 of forest!
Making biogas great again
In most African economies, the provision of free or subsidized products is not prevented by law. It has become normal that aid organizations and foreign governments disseminate free products and services to randomly selected “beneficiaries”. This is especially surprising because nothing similar is allowed in Western economies. There it is known that businesses would not be able to compete, thus their economies would go down. Have you ever wondered why this is so different in Africa?
Since its early adoption, biogas was driven by foreign governments and aid organizations. This helped to make biogas known as alternative cooking energy. However, it has failed in most cases to support a private sector development. Today it is quite obvious that local businesses cannot compete with donor-funded projects and programs. And as long as foreign money keeps coming in the motivation of governments to develop own functioning biogas markets is unfortunately often low.
Changing the story of biogas
Biogas is a magical solution to fight energy poverty and climate change, but the private sector is at risk.
We thank the international community for making biogas known in many African countries. Donor-funded programs and projects have made biogas known as a household energy solution. Now, we, the private biogas sector, need your help. Aid and business cannot exist in parallel. The transition from an aid-driven to a private sector-driven biogas sector is already happening. We need all stakeholders to agree on a new approach to make this development successful.
We ask African governments to pave the way for the private biogas sector in collaboration with local entrepreneurs while a new space for aid needs to be defined.
Together with over 130 biogas entrepreneurs in Africa, we have developed an appeal that lists the sector’s major demands to develop. It should serve as a guideline for African governments and international donors for the future development of the biogas sector in Africa.
• Implementing organizations have to be held accountable for the outcome of their programs and projects
• Failed biogas systems need to be repaired and made functional
• Real time documentation of functionality of biogas systems
• Provision of after sales service and maintenance beyond project or program duration
• End all downstream involvement of aid, e.g. direct implementation of technology, contact to biogas users, short term intervention (less than biogas system lifespan)
• Aid restricted to upstream involvement, e.g. loans for enterprises (no grants, funds, donations), micro credits for end users, promotion of biogas as systems solution on national level (no logos of organizations)
• All activities channeled through one central institution (gov./private sector)
• Past and current biogas implementation through aid funding must be listed in the publicly accessible biogas database incl. location, budget, organization, approach, functionality status of all system, customer service plan
• Detailed and verified reports of past projects/programs made available, incl. location of installed systems
• Source of funding, e.g. private donations, tax money, carbon off-set, etc. must be disclosed
Let's come together
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