BURN has secured a US$15 million investment from the European Investment Bank (EIB).
The US$15 million investment was announced during the World Bank/IMF Annual Meetings in Washington.
This funding will accelerate BURN’s efforts to manufacture and distribute its IoT-enabled ECOA electric cooking appliances to over 1 million households in East Africa.
The ECOA Induction Cooker (IDC) is equipped with innovative Pay As You Cook (PAYC) technology, integrated directly with mobile money payment systems and the ECOA Mobile App.
This allows users to pay small amounts via their mobile phones, gradually acquiring their cooking devices through daily or weekly installments, achieving full ownership within a year.
The ECOA IDC is bundled with a high-quality 3-piece stainless steel induction cookware set, that is fully manufactured in Kenya.
ECOA IDC generates high-integrity carbon credits by using integrated cellular-enabled IoT technology which allows for real-time monitoring of energy usage. Each ECOA IDC reduces ~2.5 tonnes of carbon emissions annually and will contribute to EIB’s climate action, gender equality, and economic development objectives.
Speaking from Washington the EIB Group President, Nadia Calviño said: “The investment that we have agreed today is about financing development through innovation which will strengthen communities, especially by protecting the health of women, and their families. It will have a positive impact on the climate as well by lowering carbon emissions. Investments in potentially transformative projects like this expansion of affordable clean cooking for more than a million households in Africa by BURN is just the kind of initiative that the European Union aims to support more of under our Global Gateway Initiative.”
From Washington, Peter Scott, Founder and CEO of BURN, stated, “BURN has already brought our unique PAYC electric cooking solution to thousands of households in Kenya and Tanzania that were previously relying on traditional charcoal stoves. This investment by EIB will help us transition over a million low-income households to cooking with electricity, allowing them to cook on grids that are 80-95% powered by renewable energy.”
The efficiency, safety, and benefits of BURN’s clean cooking appliances have been independently verified through a peer-reviewed Randomized Control Trial (RCT) by the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago.
The study, conducted on BURN’s cookstoves, found a match to BURN’s usage and consumption measurements.
It concluded a fuel savings of 39% against the baseline, savings of US$119 per year to families, and each cookstove reducing CO2 emissions by approximately 3.5 tons per year (their recent update to the study found these savings to be robust for 3 years and counting, with 98% of the stoves still in use).
This study was peer-reviewed and published in the world’s leading economics journal, The American Economic Review (AER).
To date, BURN has distributed over 5 million clean cookstoves across Africa, transforming the lives of over 25 million people and preventing 26 million tons of CO2 emissions from entering the atmosphere.
