Dazin, a local project with the mission to eliminate air pollution from cooking and heating has been awarded the 2018 Global Energy Award. Dazin is a cooperative enterprise working in partnership with Happy Green Cooperative. The project provides both smokeless gasifying stoves and affordable clean cooking fuel.
Dazin won the award from more than 2000 projects submitted from around 180 countries.
The project was initiated in 2014. It provides fuel cookies and smokeless stoves to rural households in exchange for forestry wood wastes. The collected wood wastes are used to produce fuel cookies or briquettes in the factory.
“Our project benefits the schools because students do not have to go to collect firewood. In the rural communities, they collect firewood and exchange with our fuel cookies as they don’t have to buy gas cylinders,” Kinley Namgay, the chairperson of Dazin, said.
Dazin also hopes to create employment for rural communities.
“Through this energy project, we also encouraging the young educated people in the villages to come up with their own project,” Sangay from Dazin said.
Bhutan has one of the highest firewood per capita consumers in the world mainly due to energy requirements in rural areas especially with fodder cooking for livestock.
