Environmental Projects in Africa

Over the years Ripple Africa has developed its environmental projects. As a result of deforestation in Malawi our first environmental project was community tree planting which continues to be a very successful project with about three million trees planted each year. We also realised it was important to enable the local communities to protect their forests so our forest conservation project started.

At the same time we became aware that one of the big causes of deforestation was the traditional method of cooking which used large amounts of firewood. We worked with the communities and developed a fuel-efficient cookstove which we called the Changu Changu Moto (Fast Fast Fire). Today, we have more than a quarter of a million people who have their food cooked every day on one of these fuel-efficient cookstoves. This is saving 80,000 bundles of wood every week.

With the success of these projects and the community engagement, we realised the same approach could be utilised in Lake Malawi to address the over-fishing problem. That was the start of the Fish Conservation project in 2012 and today there are over 2,000 Fish Conservation Committee members protecting 300km of lakeshore.