Visual Project Management | Grant Work: The Power of Poo

I proposed and won an International Women’s Media Foundation grant to tell the story of an NGO's efforts to mitigate wood-burning and deforestation in rural parts of Rwanda by arming its population with biogas digesters, which was published by Yahoo News and awarded by TED’s Visualizing Climate Change initiative. As part of the same collaborative effort between local and global producers and journalists, I also published a photo story in National Geographic on dogs' novel, therapeutic role in Kigali. 

- The Power of Poo 

Nearly half of all Rwandans live in poverty, relying on small-scale farming for survival without gas or electricity. With so many of its people spending hours of the day foraging for wood used for cooking and light, often damaging their eyes, lungs, the forests and atmosphere, a little inventiveness helps. Enter cow and enter pig—not just as a source of food, but also the heat needed to cook it. Or more specifically, their poo—the fuel fed to a biogas digester, a tank that converts organic waste into methane.  

But poo’s recyclability need not be limited to just one species. Political prisoners are a lasting legacy of the 1994 genocide, which has meant an increase of human waste into the environment and deforestation. But now, all of Rwanda’s prisons reuse waste from its inmates, mixed with cow dung to power their kitchens. This has in some instances decreased the use of firewood by three quarters (previously at 10 tonnes daily,) and subsequent damage to soil and air.  

Replacing more firewood with biogas in Africa has great potential for social change via improving the mental, physical, and global health of people and planet alike—by freeing long hours otherwise spent on wood-gathering (especially for children and women, who do the majority of cooking and house work,) improving both the physical and financial health of individuals and their families, and therefore the country's economy; decreasing local environmental damage as well as smoke-induced ailments; and mitigating damage to the global climate via firewood smoke and deforestation, with Rwanda’s abundant three-stone cook fires as a significant emitter of particulate matter and carbon dioxide/monoxide and black carbon aerosol. Challenges to the spread of biogas have so far arisen mostly because of inadequate awareness of the product, the costs of finding proper channels of maintenance, and simply, getting over the ick factor.