Nigerian environmentalist Tunde Adeyemi created The Kitchen Box to help rural women and girls whose health is negatively affected by emissions from burning wood, charcoal and kerosene. 65% of Nigerian households use coal or firewood for heating and cooking, with emissions killing over 100,000 women and children annually.
The Kitchen Box uses assistive-Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain for optimisation. Adeyemi’s team created an AI-Chatbot called the 360° Bot which uses 10,000+ dataset and three indigenous African languages to allow The Kitchen Box and Bio-Tank to provide over 30 extra functions, such as clean cooking, off-grid electrification, organic fertiliser production, soil bio-fertilisation, and animal feed supplements.
The Kitchen Box comes with a detachable ISO-certified gasholder bag for easy transportation of the biogas, and serve as an indicator of its presence. The bag becomes inflated after organic waste has been broken down over several days inside The Kitchen Box. Each bag comes fitted with connectors to supply the gas to any type of gas cooker, or to an electrical combustion engine for clean cooking or electrification.
Adeyemi’s innovations have been upgraded and adapted for different functionalities, with a higher capacity solution called the Bio-Tank being developed for agricultural use. The Bio-Tank is a larger size biodigester system and can be buried underground to collect and transform any type of agricultural waste into electricity, organic fertiliser and animal feed, helping farmers reduce operational cost by over 50%.
The biogas produced is safe and emissions-free; it cooks food faster than liquefied petroleum gas. The Kitchen Box and Bio-Tank are prefabricated and can be assembled in 10 minutes. They require zero maintenance and come a five-year guarantee.
The Kitchen Box presents a safer and more affordable alternative to current energy solutions in Nigeria’s rural areas and costs only a tenth of the price of existing biodigester technologies. By November 2023, Adeyemi had sold 4,000 units, which are being used by 20,000 people daily.
It is mainly women who struggle with the impact of emissions due to energy poverty; my team and I are working to end this suffering and provide women with easy access to clean energy and more food through our tech.
Tunde Adeyemi
- Websites:
- Clean Cooking
- Agriculture