Pitch competition winner makes bags to provide cleaner cooking in northern Ghana

Cornelius Piennah, winner of MEDA’s pitch competition, proposes a special cooking bag to reduce fossil fuel use in Ghana. — Cornelius Piennah/MEDA

Cleaner cooking in northern Ghana can have multiple health, environmental, and economic benefits, say the winners of Mennonite Economic Development Associates’ annual pitch competition in November 2024.

The Cooking Bag project won $10,000 at the event, held at MEDA’s November convention in Atlanta, Georgia. The prize is known as the Allan Sauder Innovation Award in honor of former MEDA president Sauder.

The Cooking Bag project is headed by Cornelius Pienaah and Sulemana Ansumah Saaka, two Ph.D students from Ghana. The project aims to reduce the use of biomass fuels like firewood and charcoal.  

It will use the prize money to produce 1,500 cooking bags for distribution. The prize money will also support training women to manufacture the bags and conducting community engagement programs to demonstrate the bag’s benefits.

The Cooking Bag is an insulated device that can be put around a cooking pot after it is removed from a heat source. The bag allows food such as rice, beans, yams or other dishes to continue cooking after being brought to a boil. The device reduces fuel consumption by 45 percent, lowering indoor air pollution and reducing the health impacts of smoke inhalation. 

Cooking indoors with firewood or charcoal contributes to more than 28,000 premature deaths in Ghana each year due to indoor air pollution, the World Health Organization estimates. 

In addition to reducing indoor smoke, the Cooking Bag will lessen the need for firewood and free women to spend more time on productive activities.

This was the second year that San Francisco-based D Prize has partnered with MEDA on the competition. All three finalists in the 2024 competition had previously won initial seed funds from D Prizes’ global competitions and carried out successful pilot projects. 

This year’s other finalists are based in Uganda and Kenya.

 Ziimba targets mass deforestation in Uganda’s cattle corridor. It pays small-scale farmers to plant trees on degraded land and develop sustainable tree farms. It provides farmers with quality inputs such as certified seeds, pesticides and fertilizers, tree seedlings, technical support, and continuous training. This helps the farmers grow high-value cash crops to triple or quadruple their income each season. Farmers also receive long-term income from harvesting fast-growing eucalyptus trees. Ziimba guarantees a market for the wood by purchasing it from the farmers and selling it directly to end users. The company has worked with more than 600 direct beneficiaries, and overseen the planting of more than 30,000 trees, with 80 acres of land under restoration.

Kenya’s Miti Mitaani tackles several difficult urban challenges. These include the impacts of rapid urbanization, deforestation, and high youth unemployment. Deforestation has reduced tree cover in Nairobi, the nation’s capital, by 22 percent in the past three years. One-third of Kenya’s youth are under or unemployed. Miti Mitaani, which means “trees in our neighborhood,” engages young people and women as “tree stewards” who plant and care for trees along riverways and other public spaces. The company pays its tree stewards to ensure the survival of the trees they plant.

Convention attendees voted to give Ziimba the People’s Choice Award. Ziimba will receive a year’s coaching from Dawn Graber, a Florida-based leadership coach. Gruber acted as emcee for MEDA’s Atlanta convention in November.

Ziimba and Miti Mitaani were awarded $5,000 each by the Schlegel family, which has sponsored the competition for many years. Rob and Ron Schlegel, in announcing the winners, said all finalists were deserving of support.

This article originally appeared in the January 2024 issue of Marketplace. Used with permission.

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