Elizabeth Jones

DelAgua Group

DelAgua is focused on transforming lives & nature through enterprise, bringing together the skills of business, academia and social venture. From DelAgua's beginning 30 years ago when DelAgua revolutionised ways of testing water quality to our ground-breaking approach to financing and delivering the largest improved cookstoves project of its kind in the world in Rwanda, The Gambia and Sierra Leone, our goal is to bring about sustainable change at significant scale for the long term. Today we continue to provide the world's major NGOs and aid agencies with the DelAgua water testing kit and are focussed on the further development and expansion of our stoves programme which harnesses carbon finance to improve rural health, develop local communities and reduce carbon emissions and deforestation. The carbon credits generated by our high quality stoves typically command a premium price because of the development dividends that come from the project. In addition to reducing carbon emissions that are produced when wood is burned, the project also offers significant health, economic and gender benefits impacting multiple UN SDGs. To date the project, funded by the sale of carbon credits, has distributed over 1.5 million stoves free of charge to rural households, benefiting 7.5 million Rwandans. DelAgua has since formed three new partnerships, signing MoUs with the Governments of Liberia, Sierra Leone and The Gambia. Each of these Governments is committed to transforming the lives of their poorest rural communities as well as cutting carbon emissions.