Eighty percent of rural households in Malaysia's North Borneo states of Sabah and Sarawak still rely on firewood for cooking, which contributes to lung disease and, in some cases, deforestation. Green Empowerment and our partners aim to address this challenge through the knowledge exchange and follow up work with communities to deliver a cooking fuel alternative, while encouraging these communities to think about waste more creatively.

This SEPS knowledge exchange includes a two-week training course in Sri Lanka with additional training in Malaysian Borneo. While in Sri Lanka, the participants will learn in a classroom setting and visit a number of project sites, as well as participating in the construction of a biodigester. Green Empowerment and Janathakshan aim for the participants to leave the exchange with the ability to design, install and manage low-cost biogas digester systems. They are also expected to be able to teach these skills to their colleagues and to promote the dissemination of biodigester technology within their home regions.

The exchange event in Sri Lanka will take place from 10 – 22 March 2018.

The exchange activities are centred around a series of practical capacity-building workshops, bringing together a range of actors from community groups and academia with the direct ability to replicate and promote the advancement of biodigester technology.

In addition, the exchange programme provides support for the creation of locally and regionally appropriate training materials, “field days” to promote biodigester implementation to potential users and public agencies, and a national-level event to share local experiences, raise awareness of the technology within public and international agencies, promote existing replication capacity created through the exchange, and strengthen the national level network.

Recently, the first out of three initial workshops was carried out in El Paraíso (Imbabura, Northern Sierra, 19 - 21 Feb). It focused on practical details of tubular plastic digester design/sizing, installation, and appropriate siting to ensure sustainability.

Participants represented rural community organisations, smallholders and local universities, and a significant number came from local government and agribusinesses, providing an opportunity to integrate additional viewpoints into discussions of biodigester application during the workshop. The vast majority of the participants aim to install and/or improve an existing biodigester within the next three months.

The following two workshops will take place in El Empalme (Guayas, South/Central Coast, 23 – 26 Mar) and Ayancay (Cañar, Southern Sierra, 26 – 28 Mar).

One of our recent SEPS projects under the framework of the Colombian Biomass Network – RedBioCOL – aims to make use of the organic waste generated by coffee cultivation and common practices in diversified production processes. Three technologies will be implemented to establish the energy sovereignty of the farmer organisations: gasification-fuelled cookstoves, tubular plug-flow biodigesters and gasification-fuelled coffee dryers.

Construction and implementation activities related to the technologies have recently been carried out at a number of coffee farms. Furthermore, training sessions were run at UTA’s headquarters, during which the input of coffee into a drying unit and the operation of a corresponding biomass gasifier were demonstrated for 6 consecutive hours. This practical display is important because most participating farmer organisations are familiarising themselves with biogas technology for the first time.

Other workshops aimed at disseminating the results of the project among various local and regional actors, as well as targeting university students who have expressed interest in becoming involved in monitoring activities.