Karugrid and Afstor have jointly produced an intelligent clean cooking solution to be used in rural, non-electrified and disconnected villages.
The Afstor Solar Home and Cooker System (SHS) delivers clean cooking opportunities for people at African villages. The traditional way of preparing food is by burning wood. Burning wood significantly adds to deforestation impacting climate change. Collecting firewood requires substantial time and effort. It is a tedious task, which is typically left for women and girls. This decreases the opportunities for girls to attend school and women to be part of income-generating working life. The Afstor SHS enables and speeds up the transition from wood burning towards clean cooking with renewable solar electricity removing also the need for the unequal wood-collecting practices.
Furthermore, as part of the integrated solar-powered package, the produced electricity can be used for additional purposes. The clean electricity enables digital add-ons.
As a joint effort, Afstor and Karugrid have created intelligent digital features for the cooking solution. As the first step, Karugrid’s Karubox adds precise recording of the operating hours of the Afstor SHS. This data is the basis for carbon offset markets that the Afstor SHS delivers.
Moreover, the electricity produced by the Afstor SHS offers the delivery of modern digital services via Karubox to new places. The mobile-accessible local digital services have the power to transform the distant and unconnected African villages into digital hubs that offer e-services for the local people. An Afstor SHS with Karubox can be used to collect information about planted trees, which is part of the Afstor SHS agreement with the local users. As an extendable digital services platform, Karubox can also deliver educational material, official regional information, and even entertainment content for the local people enabling unforeseen opportunities for education, agriculture, local and digital entrepreneuring, and communication between previously unconnected people.
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Karugrid 18.5.2021