In a border town, a favorite African fuel has an uncertain future

NAMANGA BORDER POINT, Kenya/Tanzania – Juliette Hizano remembers when the police arrived. In the early morning of October 14, about 20 Tanzanian and Kenyan officers came to kick Hizano and two dozen other vendors from the place where they had been conducting business for the last few years.

They are charcoal vendors and were operating in what’s known as No Man’s Land.

The pocket of commerce is an approximately 200-foot-wide stretch of land at the border between Kenya and Tanzania that neither country owns. Difficult to govern and patrol, it is a favorite selling point for a range of vendors who profit from forestry products such as charcoal.

Technically, charcoal is illegal in the county where Hizano lives and works. But its use and trade is widespread and conducted in the open. Now this 35-year-old single mother of four and her fellow traders have been thrown into limbo. They tried to relocate to a new spot – also in No Man’s Land – farther away from town, but were kicked out a few days later.

She has no place to sell and therefore no money to buy more charcoal.

“I’m fighting for survival right now,” Hizano said while sitting in a restaurant on the Tanzanian side of Namanga, the town split between two countries where she lives and works.

Charcoal is, by and large, the most popular fuel not only in towns like Namanga, but in many of Africa’s largest cities including nearby Nairobi. It’s cheaper than gas, cleaner than firewood and most locals say it’s easier to use and longer-lasting as well. As the continent’s population continues to grow at breakneck speed and migrate to urban centers, demand for charcoal is expected to triple by 2050, according to a report by the World Agroforestry Centre.

The problem is that charcoal has historically been produced by cutting down indigenous forests. While the practice has declined in the past few decades, between 1975 and 2010, some 75 million hectares of forests disappeared throughout Africa according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. Now, Kenyan and Tanzanian officials fear that if they don’t manage to halt deforestation, they could lose this resource forever.

“If we keep cutting trees here, it will soon be a desert,” said Paul Gichaga, a forest officer with the Kenya Forest Service in Namanga.

Cooking with charcoal can also present more immediate health hazards. Burning it indoors contributes to household air pollution, which causes a range of illnesses, including pneumonia in children under five, who inhale the soot. According the World Health Organization, 4.3 million people a year die prematurely around the world from illnesses attributable to household air pollution from solid fuels like charcoal.

In response, some officials have banned charcoal altogether.

In parts of Kenya and Tanzania, charcoal is legal, though largely unregulated. By allowing the industry to operate in the shadows, governments are losing out on millions of dollars of tax revenue. A 2011 study by the Kenya Forest Working Group estimated that the Tanzanian government loses $4 million from unpaid taxes on charcoal per year at the border with Kenya, which includes the Namanga border point.

Unregulated and risky

Instead of paying taxes, traders say they have to pay large sums of money in bribes to the authorities in order to operate. Hizano estimates that since the ban, 60 percent of her operating costs have been payoffs.

Other charcoal sellers such as Rabia Idris, 42, say sometimes it is straight theft. According to Idris, when police came to evict traders from No Man’s Land just three days after kicking them out of their original space in the middle of town, officers stole two large bags of charcoal from her and three other traders. Two bags cost $24, the equivalent of about two weeks income for Idris.

Local authorities refused to comment to Mongabay on the claims by traders.

Already, five of the twenty traders in Namanga have given up on charcoal and started selling other goods. Idris, who is originally from Moshi, Tanzania, says she may have to go back to selling vegetables, which will make it much more difficult to provide for her two kids and put them through school.

She’s not alone in her choice of work.

According to the FAO, five percent of Africa’s workforce is employed by the charcoal or firewood industry, which is approximately 20 million people, using workforce data from the International Monetary Fund.

There have been problems, though. Fresh from a regular traders gathering to purchase charcoal, which they do collectively to save money, Idris said the meeting had been chaotic.

The heated conversation centered around the fact that the traders have no space to even sell their goods. The eviction the previous week from No Man’s Land in town hurt their business. Hizano says she only sold one large bag the entire week after being kicked out.

Now, the traders’ lack of capital means they will struggle not only to buy charcoal but also to pay for security, which is $1 per trader per week. The traders hire a security guard to prevent thieves from taking charcoal during the night.

While Idris, Hizano and the other merchants are painfully aware of the charcoal ban, the people who use the fuel are often oblivious.

Necessary resource

Elizabeth Sadia, 20, who cooks for her extended family of seven in Namanga, didn’t even know that there was a ban. Sadia did notice that prices have gone up in the last year or so, from $8 a bag to $12. She said she uses charcoal for lunch and dinner, because it is long-lasting, but that it would be a waste to use it to make tea in the morning.

But if she had to use exclusively gas, Sadia estimates it would cost her twice as much.

Both Idris and Hizano buy charcoal from local Masaai, most of whom are pastoralists and produce charcoal as a secondary source of income.

The problem: most of the trees they use are species of indigenous acacia trees, says Gichaga from the Kenya Forest Service. To process the wood into charcoal, they use what’s called an ‘earth kiln’, which is basically a pit in the ground.

Due to stricter enforcement by authorities, poaching trees from protected indigenous forests has become more difficult in recent years, so producers increasingly use private farms. While producing charcoal is still illegal in the county, Gichaga says using farms is the only sustainable way forward.

“It is indeed possible to have both charcoal and trees,” he says.

Henry Neufeldt, head of climate change at the World Agroforestry Centre, says that charcoal could become a sustainable fuel if managed correctly. He says governments need to come to terms with the fact that demand for charcoal will not disappear anytime soon, so better practices up and down the supply chain need to be incentivized. For example, using more efficient, modern kilns to produce charcoal.

Neufeldt says banning charcoal will only work if governments come up with a viable alternative to it, something they’ve failed to do so far. Without access to another source of fuel, a ban will simply “raise shadow prices,” like bribes, he says.

Alternatives

While large foreign donors have been hesitant to invest in sustainable charcoal, entrepreneurs are taking on the challenge.

Sanivation, a Kenyan company that launched last year, creates fuel briquettes from charcoal dust and human waste. Using thermal energy, the company heats human waste to very high temperatures, which makes it safe to use. These briquettes save people 15 to 20 percent of their fuel expenditure, says Benjamin Kramer-Roach, director of operations for Sanivation. By the end of the year, Kramer-Roach says the company will have sold about 110 tons of briquettes.

Another company, Nairobi-based BURN, makes a more efficient stove named jikokoa which can reduce charcoal use by half according to their website.

None of these new enterprises, however, will be of any consolation to Hizano, Idris and dozens of other charcoal traders.

A week after speaking with Hizano in person, she sent a message on WhatsApp saying that the police have evicted them once more from their latest place of business.

“I didn’t know where to go,” she wrote. “I was so scared.”

Banner image: A cook fries potato chips using charcoal at the Salama Guest House on the Kenyan side of Namanga. Photo by Nathan Siegel

Nathan Siegel is a Nairobi, Kenya based freelance photographer and writer. Follow him on Twitter at @nathansieg