….Target 1 million Households in 4 Years
Edoamaowo Udeme
GAS360 a clean cooking startup in Nigeria headed by Emmanuel Uwandu and Modern West Advisory (MWA), a climate advisory company in Calgary, headed by Otomi Afiegbe, signed a partnership to accelerate access to clean cooking for 1 million households and generate carbon in Nigeria.
This partnership was facilitated today in Abuja by the Canadian Trade office, Nigerian Content and Monitoring Board and National Council on Climate Change.
The partnership was signed in the presence of the DG of the NCCC, who communicated his excitement about the partnership and commitment to ensuring clean cooking was adopted nation wide, greatly reducing our carbon emissions.
This comes after both companies signed partnerships with NESGAS Producing Ltd, which is building a 50,000 metric ton LPG depot in Onne, Rivers State. NESGAS will use GAS360s technology to distribute 1 million tons of LPG annually and MWA would ensure all ESG monitoring and compliance.
According to Emmanuel Uwandu, the CEO, GAS360, GAS360 distributes clean cooking LPG and provides microfinancing to retailers. MWA provides advisory services, across North America, Europe and now Africa, on ESG, GHG management, CO2 and methane emission reduction technology, as well as access to carbon markets.
“With the project we want to serve 1 million households over the next four years, reduce carbon emission in Nigeria with our predetermined goals, provide 10 billion naira to finance many of these small businesses.”
Towards 1 million households. We’ve signed a partnership with NESGAS producing limited, they are building a 50,000 metric tonne LPG gas, so the facility is going to distribute a 2 million metric tonnes/ of/ LPG annually”.
“In 2020 over 100,000 households went back to getting fuels, Household that had switched to clean energy before, but because of COVID they went back and what we figured was the collapse of small businesses supplying this fuels” when you don’t have the supply chain, people revert back to charcoal and firewood”
” To put it in simple term, it is easier to get firewood and charcoal at the last mile than it is to get clean cooking gas. That is why our business model is focusing on supporting the small businesses and this small businesses exists, and they are profitable”.
“You don’t have to tell people to wake up in the morning and supply LPG because they are making money from it. Think about, you know, digitization of payments. It’s easier to get money through POS stores now, the reason why it’s functional is because those people are making money”.
“There’s an incentive for them to wake up every morning and open their stores to ensure that people want access to last mile finance. We are not targeting the highly placed, we are supporting the small businesses to ensure that they have critical supply and position them to be able to get more customers, you know that way our business is sustainable because the more people make money from the platform, you don’t have to tell them to wake up and do more”.
In his remarks, Salisu Dahiru the Director-General of the National Council on Climate Change noted that the Council will establish a functional framework for carbon trading and that will provide ample opportunities for the National Climate Change Action Plan.
“Each entity in Nigeria that has 50 staff and above whether it is private or public is expected to have one a sustainability officer or a climate change officer that we serve as the climate change desk”
“They will collate data and information on how your entity organisation has implemented the climate change action plan every year and pass on the information to us for analysis for enforcement purposes to see whether you’ve met the minimum requirements as contained in the allowances that has been given to you or not”.
“If you are at par, you are safe but ,if you are below, we calculate the differences and decide the kind of sanctions that we’re going to impose on you, maybe additional fines, maybe some additional penalties, or things like that, if consistently you’ve done that for 10 years and you have always exceeded your targets, we will consider you eligible for a reward, so there’s going to be carrot and stick approach”.
“That enforcement part is the one that will drive people, if they know all their energy consumption is by diesel or they’re baking bread with firewood or they’re using charcoal or the office there is no automation, or vehicles that are using compressed natural gas or LPG or CNG, and they’re unable to meet the minimum emission that they were allowed to do they exceed it, enforcement will catch them and they’ll be forced to begin to look for gas360”