Turning cow dung into fuel: How Anewa is cooking up a cleaner climate

A decade ago, Rose Anewa would buy only a sack of charcoal to meet her family’s energy needs for a month.

But over the years, as her family increased in size, Anewa was forced to triple her budget for charcoal.

Matters even became worse when she separated from her husband over costly family expenditure. Now a sole breadwinner, Anewa’s family, which is made up of 12 members—four of them belonging to her relatives—began to struggle. She could barely hold on to the financial demand as time went on, and so she had to look for a way out: cutting trees for firewood.

“Generally, I would say life has not been fair to me in the recent past. First, my husband woke up one morning in May of 2022 and disappeared into thin air and no one knows where he is,” remembers Anewa, a famer, who lives in Atyenda East trading center in Zombo district.

“He left me with seven children [and] relatives whom I’m struggling to feed,” she says, adding that “the biggest challenge has been [buying] charcoal for cooking which I used to spend close to 150,000 shs every month on”.

Then last year she saw a silver lining. It was during her visit in Kampala when she noticed women seated by the dusty road in Kyebando, a suburb, moulding cow dung briquettes and laying them on flat plastic wrap to dry. When she got close and asked what they were doing, Anewa narrates, they told her it was meant for fuel.

“They were saving a lot of money from using cow dung for cooking,” she says. “I spoke to at least five other women involved in this practice.”

When she got back to her village in Zombo, Anewa decided to replicate the same idea. She and the kids began collecting cow dung in the neighboring communities and began experimenting on several porotypes until she perfected it.

Since that time, Anewa has been making her briquettes from cow dung.

Charcoal burning is one of the major causes of forest depletion

As population continues to surge, so is the demand for wood fuel to meet the energy needs of the people. In Uganda, an estimated 90 percent still rely on charcoal as a major source of fuel, yet the country still loses 120,000 hectares of forest cover annually. In the West Nile subregion, a 2018 report by Uganda’s Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development indicates, 85% of all households use firewood, charcoal, and timber as their primary source of energy, which accounts for 28.6% of the tree loss.

The alarming tree loss has forced the government to impose a ban on commercial charcoal production, since last year, to save the depleting forests. But the ban has come with a lot of complexities. Locals have been struggling to access cleaner and reliable energy alternatives and charcoal prices, which are sold by illegal traders, continue to soar.

“The figures never lie,” says William Amanzuru from Friends of Zoka, a non-governmental organization. “West Nile has been making headlines in terms of destruction to the forest cover through illegal logging for the last ten years, including prominent government officials who pretend to be untouchable but turn their anger on the innocent environment. Some of them are involved in illegal commercial charcoal burning at the expense of the environment.”

Amanzuru urges people to adopt the use of briquettes from cow dung, stating that it would thus reduce the pressure on forests to meet energy needs.

Anewa echoes the same view. She says that  the cow dung briquettes have not only been cost-effective, but they are have enabled to stop cutting the trees for firewood thus saving the environment.

Studies show that briquettes from dung is considered to be carbon-neutral because it is made from organic waste material that would otherwise decompose and emit planet-warming greenhouse gases like methane.

“This magic has saved me a lot of money”

Beside saving the environment, Anewa has realized that her “monthly expenditure on energy needs drastically reduced by over a half”.

“So these days, I channel the money I was wasting on charcoal and firewood to my regular group savings account in our village,” she adds.

This has also been scrimping her earnings from selling the briquettes and investing in her two-acre garden of groundnuts every season.

Anewa has also inspired locals in her communities to use cow dung as a source of energy.

On a recent afternoon, she and another three women held the dung with their bare hands and moulded them into wet briquettes the size of an orange fruit.

She then placed them on papyrus reeds to dry for at least two days, depending on the heat from the sun.

“We mix the cow dung with charcoal dust only. But sometimes we include small pieces of dry grass and most times we use either black jack, cassava leaves, or even leaves of maize or beans to enhance the burning performance by increasing the energy density,” she says, adding that the concoction adds to the density of the briquettes thus improving its calorific value of the briquettes.

“After drying,” Anewa explains, “I then pick about three pieces of the dry cow dung briquettes and include them together with some little charcoal and light the charcoal stove.”

Anewa does need to buy labour to collect the dung since her kids are able to chip in. On average, her kids are able to collect close to 20 kg of fresh cow dung every day for briquette making. The dung collected grazing areas in Zeu Sub County and Athuma and Alangi Sub counties in Zombo district.

Each briquette, Anewa says, goes for 200 Uganda shillings, adding that she is able to afford her family’s daily expenditure.

“This magic has saved me a lot of money” which I would have wasted on buying charcoal,” Anewa narrates gleefully.

This story was produced with support from the 11th Hour Project through the Northern Uganda Media Club (NUMEC)