(ERGO) – A group of young displaced people in Dollow, southern Somalia’s Gedo region, are using garbage and an invasive tree species as alternative materials to make charcoal.
The 12 youth, including three women, have three machines, each producing three sacks of charcoal a day, making the group an average of $72 a day through sales of the fuel.
Mohamed Hussein Ali, a member of the group living in Kambaso IDP camp on the outskirts of Dollow, said the method is much easier than the traditional way of burning charcoal, and is also more environmentally sound.
As well as waste collected from the camp, they use the Algaroba tree, a non-indigenous parasite tree that has invaded large areas of land making it unusable.
“It used to take us 25 days to make each batch of charcoal and we suffered a lot from that process,” Mohamed said.
“Everyone earns $5 a day, and we keep the rest until the end of the month to save to invest in the cooperative so we can buy bigger machines and increase production.” The group averages monthly savings of $180.
Abdirizak Abdirisak Mohamed Abdirahman, another member of the new group, had been producing charcoal traditionally for nearly four years, after he and his family of five children were displaced from Wajid district in Bakool region. Joining a charcoal gang was the only job he could find in the camp.
He became aware of the considerable environmental destruction they we causing in cutting down valuable indigenous trees to make the charcoal. It was also a highly inefficient method, with unpleasant working conditions, and he never earned enough to pay his bills. Fatuma Kahin Hassan, a mother of seven children, used to operate a donkey cart with her husband transporting charcoal in Garaash, just north of town. She says this is a far more efficient business. “We used to cut our hands cutting and chopping the trees with an axe. Also there was a lot of pressure to stop deforestation and we were told to stop,” she said.
The fuel produced by these machines, using waste and the parasite tree, is becoming popular as it is cheap and easy to burn
