Nearly half the world’s population cooks with biomass. Open fire cooking represents the world’s largest environmental public health challenge contributing to climate change, deforestation, disability and mortality, while keeping families in the cycle of poverty to collect or purchase fuel for daily cooking. Household Air Pollution from open cooking fires kills 4.3 million people a year (more than HIV, Malaria and TB combined). Globally families who cook with traditional methods spend on average up to four hours each day gathering fuel, or spend up to 30% of their income purchasing fuel.

In May 2017, Envirofit announced a new SmartGas™ programme, which enables households living in energy poverty access to LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) fuel by paying for it on an incremental basis using mobile money. The SmartGas™ programme delivers three fundamental value propositions:

• the ability to Pay-As-You-Cook™, safely
• home delivery and installation
• the prospect of never running out of LPG.

All three of these value propositions represent significant improvement for low-income and/or energy-deprived consumers in target markets.

In collaboration with Shell Foundation, Envirofit have since published a Case Study Report on the pilot which can be read here (PDF 5MB).