Uganda to start manufacturing electric pressure cookers locally

Eco–Stove an indigenous clean cooking technology manufacturing company, says it has been waiting for the Electricity Access Scale-Up Project to secure funding to import machinery to start local production of electric pressure cookers.

In an interview on Thursday, Rose Twine the chief executive officer Eco Stove told this Publication that before the end of this year, she will be travelling to China to bring the assembly plant to the country so that she can start manufacturing 10,000 units monthly, before scaling it up to 20,000 per month so that all Ugandans can get access to at least two pressure cookers per household at the cheaper price.

“Every Ugandan home needs at least two pressure cookers, but at what cost? We need to find a way to reduce the price currently; URA is charging 35 percent import duty, 18 percent VAT and 6 percent withholding tax, and all this goes to the client,” she said.

She explained that with the funding that she is going to secure from the Uganda energy credit capitalization company, she be able to bring the assembly line and install it the Bujjuko factory along the Mubende–Mityana road and Ugandans and individuals will be able to access the technologies at a subsidized cost because currently, Ugandans and institutions that a lot of biomass for their energy needs are not adopting the use of the technologies due to the initial costs of acquiring the technologies.

On Thursday, Uganda Energy Credit Capitalisation Company, Eco Bank, and Eco Stove held the Uganda clean cooking and green finance forum to discuss the issues affecting the local adoption and uptake of new energy-saving cooking technologies.

According to Ms Rose Twine, since they started operations 17 years ago, they have been able to transform only 500 large institutions which heavily rely on firewood and charcoal for their energy needs, and they have also been able to convert close to 700 households to new clean cooking technologies.

She added that they have worked with the World Food Programme, Food and Agriculture Organisation, together with the Bank to provide upfront payment for the technologies, which their clients later pay for at their convenience to remove the barrier to access to the technologies.

Roy Nyamutale Baguma, the managing director of UECCC, noted that fuels that Ugandans have been using to cook food are inefficient, and they have also been using inefficient cook stoves. He added that according to the 2024 Uganda Population and Housing Census, only 420,000 households use clean sources of energy for cooking, and the burning of biomass fuels affects the health of over 20m people and causes 13,000 deaths.

He said under the sustainable energy development program, the government aims to increase access to reliable, clean and affordable energy by reducing the amount of biomass energy used for cooking from 75 percent in 2024 to 50 percent by 2030 and one of the strategies to tackle the challenge is through promotion of a technology mix rather than a one-stove-fits-all approach.

“Examples of clean cooking solutions in the Ugandan market include electric pressure cookers, induction and electric stoves, where electricity is reliable and affordable, LPG in urban and peri-urban areas, biogas for farms and institutions, ethanol cook stoves and solar cook stoves,” he said.

Asked to explain how they are funding the project, Elizabeth Mwerinde Kassede, the head of consumer banking at Eco Bank, said that as a bank, previously they did not have a supplier of sustainable finance, and yet they have a loan facility for women-owned businesses.

Adding that, when they looked at the cost of acquiring the clean cooking technologies, they realised that whereas many people would like to own them, the cost of accessing them remains a barrier; that is why the bank stepped in to bridge the financing by asking the end user to raise 50 percent of the total cost of the unit.