FMO and BIX Capital provide $10m facility for clean cooking initiative

BIX Capital and FMO, the Dutch entrepreneurial development bank, are jointly providing a $10 million facility to C-Quest Capital to further strengthen its clean cooking activities in sub-Saharan Africa.

For many years, BIX Capital has provided loans to C-Quest Capital, a successful social impact project developer providing transformational carbon projects, including clean cooking.

This new $10 million facility will enable C-Quest Capital to further invest in its clean cooking programme in sub-Saharan Africa. As a result of funding from this facility and other sources of capital, a total of 7 million households will receive C-Quest Capital’s double cookstoves by 2026, reaching about 28 million people in over 15 sub-Saharan African countries, including Zambia, Malawi, Kenya, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Tanzania and Angola.

According to the latest IEA data, more than 2.6 billion people lack access to clean cooking, relying instead on firewood, kerosene or coal as their primary cooking fuel. The lack of access to clean cooking remains very acute in sub-Saharan Africa where the number of people without access is increasing as population growth outpaces provision efforts. Almost 490,000 annual premature deaths are related to household air pollution from the lack of access to clean cooking solutions, with women and children the worst affected. Forest degradation and deforestation is another serious consequence of the unsustainable harvesting of fuelwood.

FMO has been a cornerstone investor in BIX Capital since 2018 and has supported BIX’s Carbon Receivables Finance proposition.

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