Building A Green Charcoal Enterprise In Haiti

When my partners and I first traveled to Haiti almost five years ago, we had an idea that we thought might help a country reeling from a humanitarian disaster that wasn’t growing near enough food to feed itself.

Biochar—sustainably produced charcoal added to the soil in order to boost productivity, increase water retention, and sequester carbon—seemed like a great tool to help Haitian farmers sustainably grow more food, earn more money, and help the country get back on its feet after the crippling earthquake in January 2010. We knew little about Haiti’s history of development failures, its people, and didn’t speak the language.

For almost two years, over the course of numerous trips from the United States to a remote village in Haiti’s central plateau, we tested and developed biochar production technology, piloted different implementation models, and gradually became attuned to the obstacles and needs of rural Haitian farmers. It should have come as no surprise that our original idea to convert agricultural waste to charcoal and teach farmers to mix it in with their topsoil, was fundamentally flawed. Farmers were resistant to new farming practices, in part due to a history of failed interventions by projects and initiatives that preceded us. And lack of infrastructure meant that farmers could not get high-value crops to market before spoiling.

Our local partners saw an unexpected opportunity in our work, however. They watched as we used simple kilns to convert their corn and bean waste to small chunks of charcoal, and asked if we they could use it to cook. Eventually, after some convincing, we came to understand our Haitian friends’ enthusiasm for this idea, as it dawned on my partners and I that, to the average Haitian farmer, charcoal fuel is more valuable than food.

We soon learned three important facts:

• Over 90% of households in Haiti rely on charcoal and wood for their daily energy
• Haiti is over 98% deforested, due almost exclusively to domestic demand for charcoal fuel
• The average household in Haiti spends 40-60% of daily income on charcoal

Our work had clearly illustrated to us the direct link between widespread deforestation and poverty, both in cities where people spend a huge portion of income on charcoal, and in rural areas where rampant erosion and flooding have eaten away at arable land and leached the soil of vital nutrients. So, in late 2012, taking what we’d learned about Haiti, Haitian culture, and the local charcoal market, we formulated a business plan and officially pivoted from biochar to sustainable charcoal fuel made from agricultural waste, or green charcoal.

For the last two and a half years, Carbon Roots International has been building a green charcoal social business in and around Cap Haitien, the largest city in north Haiti. We purchase agricultural waste from local smallholder farmers, carbonize it and process it into briquettes at a central factory. Through a network of independent women retailers, we sell the green charcoal briquettes as a cheaper, cleaner, “drop-in” replacement for traditional wood charcoal cooking fuel. No new stoves or cooking methods are required.

As a local business, sourcing local materials for local consumption, our economic impact is broad, and we’re providing a sustainable product that is central to Haitian life. However, launching a startup in Haiti has been full of both expected and unanticipated obstacles. Practical and logistical obstacles abound; for example, to get our factory up and running, an in-exhaustive list of infrastructure improvements includes: build an access road, clear land of brush, construct buildings, purchase a generator and set up an electrical system, drill a well and build a water tower, and maintain hundreds of meters of canals to minimize flooding during monsoons. And riots and money shortages occasionally hamper our ability to complete day-to-day tasks. But more pernicious has been the way in which the long history of failed development in Haiti has tainted many people’s understanding of what is and isn’t possible in what is both the oldest free republic and poorest country in the Americas.

There are few successful examples to point to when building a sustainable, scalable social enterprise in Haiti. Long a top recipient of foreign aid, Haiti is often viewed as a doomed environment for development—too different, too much history, too corrupt, too complicated. But we are pushing back against that stereotype. Today, Carbon Roots International employs over 50 local staff and is the largest charcoal producer in the country. With support from our partners, such as SIDA’s Innovations Against Poverty program, we are not just helping to solve Haiti’s charcoal crisis, but also demonstrating that a good idea and appropriate technology can take hold even in the most challenging environments.

This blog is a part of our July 2015 series on inclusive business in Latin America and the Caribbean. View the full series for more from practitioners, inclusive businesses and researchers in the region.