Lighting the way: A project review of UpEnergy’s cookstove carbon credits

Sustainability leaders recognise that quantifiable and auditable data integrity drives both stakeholder confidence and strategic decision making - this project delivers on both fronts

In 2024 alone, UpEnergy’s Community Carbon cookstove programme in Uganda delivered:

• Over 587,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions avoided

  • Equivalent to removing approximately 125,000 cars from the road annually or offsetting the emissions from over 60 million long-haul flights.

• 137,927 households using cleaner stoves

  • 137,927 households represent a distributed consumer base, mitigating concentration risks and diversifying adoption across demographics.

• 44% average reduction in fuelwood use per household

  • A 44% reduction in fuelwood consumption per household translates to significant cost savings for end-users, while also reducing the time spent on fuel collection—improving household productivity and enhancing quality of life.

• 966 tonnes of firewood saved daily

  • Saving 966 tonnes of firewood daily is equivalent to preserving over 3,500 acres of forest annually, contributing to long-term ecological and supply chain stability.

• 89.5% of users reported saving money, experiencing less smoke, and spending less time cooking or collecting wood.

  • 89.5% user satisfaction highlights the product's effectiveness in reducing operational costs, improving health and safety (through less smoke exposure), and increasing time efficiency—key drivers for user retention and product adoption across the market.

The stoves distributed as part of the programme are designed to replace inefficient traditional methods of cooking, which are often carried out either on simple ceramic pots or on ‘three stone’ fires. There are different types and generations of UpEnergy stoves: from efficient charcoal stoves for those dependent on charcoal for daily cooking, through to electric cookers enabling on-grid households to stop using charcoal-based cooking entirely.

Carbon credit quality: real-time monitoring

UpEnergy was recently issued Africa’s first-ever electric cooking carbon credits under Gold Standard’s new, metered methodology - a huge leap forward for cookstove technologies funded via the voluntary carbon market. These electric stoves are great for real-time data tracking, because of the ease of monitoring electricity usage through the device. If you’re reading this from the UK, think of the smart meters you probably have at home or in your business. 

But electric stoves are not a catch-all solution for many rural and peri-urban households which often have no or very limited access to electricity. So more-efficient charcoal will remain a large proportion of the market in Uganda and elsewhere for years to come - and one challenge is how to ensure project quality when these ‘lower-tech’ stoves are the only currently-viable technology that can be accessed. Through its Community Carbon programme, UpEnergy is tackling these issues head-on.

In Kampala, we sat down with Amos Tendo, UpEnergy’s Product Development Engineer, who walked us through the real technical evolution happening behind the scenes.

To give confidence to businesses funding cookstoves projects, it’s important to help understand whether the emissions avoided by the project are real, and traditionally, cookstoves project developers have relied on household surveys to identify how the stoves are being used. These can be unreliable for a number of reasons, especially when they are the only monitoring technique used (see Hing & Gadgil, 2023).

One of UpEnergy’s solutions that it is currently testing is installing a data logger, discreetly attached to the side of their cookstoves. It’s a small but powerful upgrade, capturing real-time usage data about when the stove is heating up (indicating it is currently being used), and transmitting that back to UpEnergy over the mobile network. As well as producing usage information from individual stoves, this also allows the UpEnergy office in Kampala to understand trends in usage across all the distributed stoves in their over-a-hundred projects across East Africa. This real-time monitoring addresses audit trail requirements and reduces reputational exposure from non-additionality claims.

UpEnergy plans to integrate this kind of sensor-based monitoring into the programme and others like it as part of their wider approaches to ‘dMRV’ (digital monitoring, reporting and evaluation).

Importantly, carbon finance from your business to the project isn’t just helping households to access and afford more efficient, healthier cooking methods - it’s also helping project developers like UpEnergy invest in improving the technology and driving up the integrity of cookstove projects on the voluntary carbon market as a whole.

Responsible product lifecycle: from manufacture to materials recycling

Our team observed the full lifecycle of the Community Carbon cookstoves right from the initial manufacture.

Ceramic inserts (which are the main combustion site for the stoves) are produced by hand in a local factory, providing jobs to dozens of local staff. Once shaped, they are dried and then each one is brought together with a hand-rolled sheet metal casing and insulation to form the basis of the improved stove design. The stoves also have a temperature-regulating door, reinforced handles, and a pot stand to improve air flow.

Speaking with the local team, we were able to see just how impactful the scaling of UpEnergy’s Community Carbon programme has been over the last couple of years that the project has been supported by Ecologi. We toured the newly expanded production site, which has been enabled for this local manufacturer through the support of carbon finance from UpEnergy. 

Each stove is designed to last between 5-7 years (depending on the specific model), and continual support is provided by the UpEnergy team to the households for troubleshooting, and to ensure that stoves are well-maintained to maximise their lifecycle. With good maintenance, these stoves can last longer than the 5-7 year intended lifetime. 

Once produced, the stoves head out with trained distribution agents who transport them to specific areas in Kampala and across Uganda. This decentralised distribution network is effective because it allows local people to buy their subsidised stoves from other local people - rather than from a highly-centralised or highly-corporatised entity. The model builds familiarity and reciprocal trust between the distribution agents and the local communities they serve.

At the end of a stove’s lifecycle, UpEnergy also maintains a recycling policy which helps households to send the different materials to specific recycling channels.

Sharing benefits with local charities

Community-led distribution model addresses social value procurement requirements increasingly mandated in tenders and contract awards

As of June 2025, Uganda is host to nearly 1.9 million refugees, mainly arriving from Uganda’s northern border with South Sudan or western border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (UNHCR, 2025).

Since 2023, the Community Carbon programme from UpEnergy has been providing funding to high-impact charity initiatives which empower and uplift women and girls through its Climate Resilience Impact Fund. Over three years, UpEnergy’s support will provide 150,000 USD to each of the two nominated organisations supported by the fund: Street Child Uganda and Advancing Girls' Education in Africa (‘AGE Africa’). 

As part of our site visit in Kampala, our team was warmly received by Henry Muyanja and Marina López Rodríguez of Street Child Uganda at their HQ. This charity exists to accelerate learning outcomes and advance life opportunities for marginalised children, with a mission to see all children safe, in school, and learning. We heard from Henry and Marina that many school classes in Uganda can see a ratio of 200 pupils to a single teacher, with classes taught strictly in English - especially disadvantageous to refugee children from the DRC who often can speak limited or no English at all. Street Child Uganda’s Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) approach helps to break down some of these barriers, prioritising targeted interventions which meet the children at their current education level, rather than their age group.

Because of the Climate Resilience Impact Fund, your corporate investment in the Community Carbon cookstoves project provides funding to support disadvantaged children across Uganda to catch up on lost education and develop foundational skills.

Proactively addressing market challenges at the project level

Proactively addressing market challenges at the project level

Despite the many positive impacts, many cookstove projects have been criticised in recent years. Common concerns include the use of inappropriate assumptions in the cookstove carbon credit methodologies, overreliance on unreliable household surveys (see Hing & Gadgil, 2023), and questions about stove efficiency, adoption, and their true impact on reducing deforestation pressure—all of which can undermine confidence in the emissions avoidance produced by a project.

New developments in carbon market integrity like the ICVCM’s Core Carbon Principles (CCPs) have provided much-needed attention and improvement at the market level. However, the two-tick system from the ICVCM is applied only at the carbon standard (e.g., Gold Standard) and methodology (e.g., GS TPDDTEC v3.1) level. This means that individual project quality must still be reviewed in addition: a CCP-Approved label on a carbon credit methodology does not guarantee that every project using that methodology is itself a high-quality project. Each project has to demonstrate for itself how it is innovating, producing cascading benefits, mitigating risks, and addressing known challenges for projects of its type.

CCP-Approval mitigates regulatory risk, as governments increasingly scrutinise carbon credit quality in mandatory reporting, ensuring that projects are compliant with evolving regulatory frameworks and offering added credibility in a tightening policy environment.

And on this front, the UpEnergy Community Carbon project is aiming for the sky. This is not a project that simply ticks the boxes: the team here are proactively building a better, more verifiable, more impactful programme:

1. Where cookstoves projects can have challenges in stove usage monitoring, UpEnergy has developed new, integrated data loggers which transmit near real-time data over the mobile network.

2. Where cookstoves projects can have challenges to uptake and ‘stove stacking’, UpEnergy provides ongoing support through multiple communications channels, to help households to get the most out of their stoves.

3. Where cookstoves projects have uncertain or short life cycles, UpEnergy is supporting and lengthening the full lifecycle: from local small-scale manufacture, to stove maintenance, and finally advising households on materials-specific recycling channels. Local manufacturing partnerships create supply chain diversification opportunities beyond carbon benefits