Keep It Bag gets cooking in Hillview

Project 90 by 2030’s Keep It Bag initiative empowers women from marginalised communities with the necessary skills – through training and capacity building – to enhance their energy security.

On 24 May 2016, we introduced the concept of heat retention cooking as a clean, low-cost, low-tech alternative for energy provision to a group of 30 local women from Hillview in Lavender Hill, Western Cape. We demonstrated the concept of heat retention cooking using a Keep It Bag.

Most of the women living in Hillview have access to electricity, however many still rely on cooking over open fires and spend large amounts of time gathering biomass for burning, when they cannot purchase electricity at certain times.

The women responded with excitement that their concerns about energy for cooking could be solved through the use of a Keep It Bag.  Now they can save time at the stove, save energy and have food ready when they wake up or come home from work. They were enthusiastic about the convenience the Keep It Bag offered in terms of being able to get on with other tasks while their food “cooked” in the bag without it burning.

It also emerged that having hot water to wash with in the mornings, especially in winter, presents a big challenge to many of the women. They were very excited about the prospect of being able to keep a pot of water warm in a Keep It Bag for use in the morning.

A number of the women sold food as a means of earning income, and using a Keep It Bag to keep their food hot at the point of sale means that they can make savings on the energy needed to keep the food hot.

We explained the concept of the technology behind the Keep It Bag, and introduced the idea of combining the use of the Keep It Bag with a rocket stove to save even more energy, fuel and time. This is especially useful under the circumstances of expensive and unreliable energy provision.

We have been invited back to the community, to explore the concept of making heat retention cookers out of locally collected materials. Now the women are enthusiastically gathering a number of possible insulating materials that could be used to build a large outdoor heat retention cooker for their community centre.

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