Betty Ikalany is eager to include women in her budding briquette-making enterprise. She believes the income-generating potential offered by briquette-making will empower women by making them more economically independent.
She specifically targets women living with HIV/AIDS and girls dropping out of school due to pregnancy because these two groups usually suffer greatly from stigma and discrimination in the community, which impedes their ability to provide a living for themselves.
NEWS: Nature Kenya said in a press release on March 14 that forests are rapidly disappearing as a result of charcoal and firewood for salt manufacturing factories at the Coast despite a ban on firewood collection by the National Environment Management Authority and Kenya Forest Service in January.
“Hundreds of, mainly, men from around the Dzalanyama forest reserve in Malawi have been descending on it, camping deep inside it, felling trees for charcoal burning. Lizinet Josiah, 28, reckons that there are no culprits worse than those from her village.
She also knows that sustaining the forest would bring back the reliable rainfall. But she chooses to stun you, instead.
“As long as the charcoal alleviates our poverty and gives us something with which to buy food, the forest can go,” she says.”
“It’s all because of poverty. We want to have food but we don’t have money to buy the food or fertiliser to boost our food yields. We get something from the charcoal from the forest. We buy food and top up what we get under the farm income subsidy programme. What we get is little and this season was worse.”