Kenyan Mukuru Clean Stoves, has been awarded $1.2 million as 2022 Earthshot prize winner. The solution was among five winners chosen for the Prince of Wales’s prestigious Earthshot Prize. Africa’s Roam Motors and Mukuru Clean Stoves were nominated as finalists for the 2022 Earthshot Prize.
Prince William announced the winners on Friday at an awards ceremony in Boston in the US.
“I believe that the Earthshot solutions you have seen this evening prove we can overcome our planet’s greatest challenges,” Prince William said during the ceremony.
Mukuru Clean Stoves is a social enterprise that designs, produces and distributes improved, reliable and affordable cook stoves for low income households. Charlot Magayi 29, CEO and founder, started the project in 2017 at Mukuru kwa Njenga slum, one of the biggest slums in Nairobi, Kenya targeting under-served markets to help mothers keep their children safe, save on fuel consumption and reduce household air pollution.
“Mukuru Clean Stoves began as a solution to a problem that I had felt personally in my own life. Today, we have an opportunity to transform the lives of millions, with cheaper, safer and more sustainable cookstoves and fuels. It is a privilege to be recognised by The Earthshot Prize as we embark on the next step in our journey,” said Charlot Magayi.
Inspired by President John F. Kennedy’s Moonshot challenge in the 1960s, which united millions of people around the goal of putting a person on the moon within a decade, The Earthshot Prize aims to discover and help scale innovative solutions that put the world firmly on a trajectory toward a stable climate by 2030 – a world in which communities, oceans and biodiversity can thrive in harmony.
Each year over the course of this critical decade for the planet, five winners will be chosen for their ground-breaking solutions to five of the greatest environmental challenges facing our planet. These five Earthshots are: Protect and Restore Nature; Clean our Air; Revive our Oceans; Build a Waste-free World; and Fix our Climate.
The other wining solutions are:
- Protect and Restore Nature: Kheyti, India – A pioneering solution for local smallholder farmers to reduce costs, increase yields and protect livelihoods in a country on the frontlines of climate change.
- Revive our Oceans: Indigenous Women of the Great Barrier Reef, Australia – An inspiring women led program that combines 60,000 years of indigenous knowledge with digital technologies to protect land and sea.
- Build a Waste-free World: Notpla, United Kingdom – A circular solution creating an alternative to plastic packaging from seaweed.
- Fix our Climate: 44.01, Oman – Created by childhood friends who have developed an innovative technique to turn CO2 into rock, and permanently store it underground
