Wonderbag: Blending traditional cooking, community empowerment, and modern carbon markets – Sarah Collins
Wonderbag was a company established in 2008 as a solution to South Africa's energy crisis providing families with a means to continue cooking daily meals during power outages. Resembling a colourful bag reminiscent of a pumpkin, Wonderbag employs ancient heat retention cooking technology, providing employment and income opportunities to entrepreneurs across the developing world. In South Africa, manufacturing is outsourced to 2000 entrepreneurs, primarily women, providing them with vital income. Founder of Wonderbag, Sarah Collins told BizNews in an interview about the business model she pioneered, her high-profile carbon clients including Sasol, Anglo American and Nandos. She also highlighted South Africa's role in crafting legislation to bolster carbon credit projects.
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Summary of the interview with Sarah Collins
Linda van Tilburg interviews Sarah Collins, founder of Wonderbag, a non-electric portable cooker designed to address South Africa's energy crisis. Established in 2008, Wonderbag enables families to cook meals during power outages using heat retention technology. Collins explains its operation: food is brought to a boil, then placed in the insulated bag where it continues to cook for hours.
The Wonderbag model emphasizes entrepreneurship, employing over 20,000 entrepreneurs, predominantly women, across various countries, including South Africa. Notably, Wonderbag utilizes carbon credits for funding, making it affordable for low-income households. Carbon credits subsidize the bag's cost, ensuring accessibility.
Collins discusses the challenges and importance of carbon credit financing, especially in South Africa, where government legislation supports carbon projects. Despite market fluctuations, partnerships with companies like Nandos and SASOL drive Wonderbag's sustainability initiatives.
She underscores the impact of carbon markets, highlighting the transformational effects on communities, particularly women. Collins emphasizes the need for global awareness and action on climate change, urging continued support for innovative solutions like Wonderbag. Through collaboration and innovation, she believes addressing climate change can become a global priority.
Extended transcript of the interview
Linda [00:00:23] I am Linda van Tilburg for Biznews and I have Sarah Collins, the founder of Wonderbag in the new studio. It was established in 2008 and developed as a solution to South Africa's energy crisis, providing families with the means to continue cooking daily meals even during power outages. An interesting aspect of Wonderbag's business model is its innovative use of carbon credits for funding. And today, Sarah Collins is here in the studio with us to share more about Wonderbag and its pioneering carbon offset program. Hi Sarah, Sarah, welcome to Biz News.
Hi Linda, thank you so much for having me. It's great to be with you.
Linda [00:01:21] So I say. So, Sarah, what exactly is Wonderbag?
Sarah [00:01:27] So Wonderbag is a non-electric portable cooker. It's based on an ancient technology of heat retention cooking. To give everybody sort of a visual – it looks like a giant colourful pumpkin. How it works is you bring your food to the boil on a fire or a stove, and then once it's at boiling temperature, you take the pot with its lid off and you put it into the Wonder bag, and it continues to cook for 8 to 12 hours.
Sarah [00:02:10] It's been around for many, many centuries. A lot of people know heat retention cooking, and in the early 70s, there was the Hay Box with Bridget Oppenheimer, the Wonder Box with Bridget Oppenheim and Woman for Peace. And so that's how I found, I remembered my grandmother used to have a box with cushions in it, and she used to in the kitchen on the farm, bring food to a boil and then put long cooking things into the box and as children were not allowed to open or touch that box. so, when I was exploring alternative energy sources, that memory came and I thought, why can't we bring, heat retention cooking into the 21st century? So, that's exactly what I've done.
Linda [00:03:06] Who makes these Wonderbag?
Sarah [00:03:10] Wonderbag is based on a sort of entrepreneurial development model. So, we have our factory in Tongaat, which we've had for 15 years, but we utilise entrepreneurs to manufacture our Wonderbags. We look at communities, and women's organisations that, have sewing machines, and can sew, and then we outsource our manufacturing so that they can scale their businesses within the family of Wonderbag. It's a model that is exciting because it takes people into their businesses. It takes them out of poverty, not just giving them a job. Then they create opportunities for other people. We've done that across the world in all our manufacturing.
Linda [00:04:07] How many entrepreneurs are involved?
Sarah [00:04:11] We've been around for 16 years. Yesterday was our 16th birthday, and. Over the years. Sure, there's been many, but we have 20,000 entrepreneurs that are working with us, in different countries and we've got over 10 million Wonderbags in homes.
Linda [00:04:35] How many entrepreneurs do you have and how many come from South Africa?
Sarah [00:04:48] We've got about 2000 in South Africa right now.
Linda [00:04:53] That's an incredible story. What I'm also interested in is this model to fund Wonderbag through carbon credits. How does that work and how did you come up with that idea?
Sarah [00:05:06] Well, I think, that's the basis of the development work that I've been doing for three decades, which is looking at how we fund innovative projects that are changing people's lives in the most vulnerable areas and the most vulnerable communities across the world. NGOs are philanthropic money or corporate social investment, but that is transient money. And so, I wanted to look at, a mechanism, a financial tradeable mechanism that could be the commercial element to funding one to banks, to people who need them the most. That's the mission of Wonder Bag is to get one or two bags to people at a price they can afford. So, I don't believe that anything should be free. But I don't believe if you take a Wonderbag to somebody and say it's R550 and they can't afford that, that is really not the right thing to do. So, I was looking at how to find something that could subsidise it down to a price that a person can afford. So, when I was exploring that space, carbon credits came up and green financing and 40 years ago, the concept of supporting the people most affected by climate change. They needed to be compensated in some way by the largest polluters in the world and to give them innovations that would be culturally relevant to support their growth, economic stimulation and growth and success through the disasters that we are seeing of climate change right now, like droughts, floods, etc… So, that's how carbon credits were initially envisaged, was to support people most affected by climate change and energy resources ad so that is what attracted me to it. To get a carbon credit, you have to prove additionality. So, what that means is that you have to prove that the people who are getting the bag at the subsidised price would not otherwise be able to afford a wonder bag. We launched our first carbon projects in 2010, in Rwanda, in leastdeveloped countries, and 2012, in South Africa and then the markets actually took a big dive in those years. It was very viable, it was the right thing to do from a financing perspective.
Unfortunately, 2012 saw the whole carbon market collapse. But what's really significant, I think, for business and for me to share with the South African audience, is that the South African government took a really bold, progressive step in terms of climate mitigation and climate financing because they brought in a carbon tax and they legislated which meant that South Africa became a compliance market, and that meant that we had a base price so that we can trade carbon, with a floor price. And I really want to really emphasise the leadership of South Africa in terms of this globally. That's why many countries in Africa are struggling with carbon projects because there isn't legislation and therefore there isn't a floor price, which makes it a very high-risk summit project in South Africa. Recipe for Change was launched as a compliance project and how it works, just so people can visualise what a carbon credit is. That's the thing is like most people don't understand it and I get it. So, if you visualise somebody cooking sump and beans for example, and they have a big pile of firewood, and the pot is boiling, and you keep putting firewood underneath that pot so it can continue to boil for six hours. Now what you do is you bring it to a boil for 20 minutes, you put it into the Wonderbag, you close the Wonder bag and you put the fire out. We then calculate the savings of that wood, or the electricity or the paraffin, and that gets then measured. So, you measure how many emissions were not emitted and that's where you get a ton of saved carbon.
Linda [00:10:15]. So, interesting, the way you calculate it.
Sarah [00:10:24] It's a very highly regulated market and you are audited every year, and you have to get certification through, there a number of certification bodies. We are registered with Verra which is based in Washington. And there are barriers right now in terms of the issuing of carbon credits and one of them has been, a lot of scrutiny and a lot of methodology and questioning, which has slowed down the markets. But we believe these are teething problems. We support this because we believe that true transparency is going to give us higher valuable credits that people can go. So, you can go and see how we save carbon credits in the field. You can go and see how we calculated. We have a very simplistic data-capturing system. So, we have very community-based monitoring on the ground. But, we have software backing that up. So, we are very much a data-driven business, which people don't think because they see this old-fashioned Wonderbag and think, well, that's prehistoric. And yet it is changing the way people cook across Africa. I think it's really important that people understand that if we can work with governments to persuade them to legislate like South Africa has done, and they have a really robust and amazing vision in terms of how they've done this and the support that they're giving to carbon projects that are developing in South Africa. So, I've been around for a long time. We've been a carbon credit business for 12, 14 years now. But, we're at a very critical and exciting time. I think one of the challenges that we have in South Africa is getting the purchasing and the funding from our own South African banks and getting people to understand how this get credit. the market works; how does this make sense? I think that there is and we are working with the banks, to look at how we innovate funding. I think in this world we're living in right now, innovation, not just in projects like mine, which are changing the way people cook, but innovation in the funding space – how do we use our carbon credits? How do we use ESG? How do we use, the valuation and monitoring of the Sustainable Development Goals that we are achieving through Wonderbag? How do we then pass those over to the funders so that they can report with transparency of investment into projects? So, this is the kind of work that I'm excited about and as one, certainly the only woman project development in the world. But also, because I've been around a long time, I understand the loopholes. I understand the difficulties, and the challenges and understand all those things. It's not straightforward, but I think it's a very critical way for us to equalise the status quo in the climate space between the people most affected by the biggest emitters.
Linda [00:14:10] Who are your customers for the carbon credits?
Sarah [00:14:20] So, we work with companies like Nandos, Anglo-American, and EDF. So, most of us are offshore, out of South Africa, our buyers. SASOL is a big buyer of ours. We work very closely with SASOL, and they have an amazing appetite, even though they are the biggest emitters, they are also very forward-thinking, and I applaud SASOL for the way that they are taking this and then taking people like Wonderbag and myself and saying, how can we walk this journey with you? So, I think there's some really great stuff happening in South Africa. I certainly am extremely excited about Recipe for Change as a leader and a pioneer in the carbon credit business. And I'm excited by our partners, the people who are working with us, because it is early days and it's not all, it's not easy. That's what I will tell you, it sounds wonderful and glamorous but there are lots of stumbling blocks, but that's okay because it means that the robustness of the carbon markets, the transparency as well as the integrity and also the crediting, not over claim credits to ensure that credits are properly issued for the right amount per Wonderbag or cookstove or per whatever. And so, I think it's very important. I'm very fortunate to have a business called Promethium Carbon, which has been around for 20 years. Robbie Louw is the founder of that, and they are my carbon partners in terms of the consultants and the work, the technical work and they are leaders in the field globally. So, to have them is golden.
Linda [00:16:21] Anything else you want to add?
Sarah [00:16:31] The carbon markets are really something that we need to understand more about and I think that as this transition goes, goes forward and the bumps in the road, I think we need platforms like what you are giving me to speak about this and to actually show the positive impact because what people don't see is the 500,000 woman whose lives have been changed by the one day back, from subsidised carbon funding. So, once you can visualise Gogo Dlamini in a hut whose life has changed, the girls are now in school. She only has to have a fire for 20 minutes a day. Then you realise that your biggest emitters are connecting directly to the people who are most affected. And so, it equalises humanity and I think it's really important that we don't just look at one aspect of this. We actually look at the whole circular economy around this and the impacts that it's having. So, it's a complex business model. It's it's not straightforward. People often just roll their eyes at me, but I think it's something that young people are incredibly curious about. They count their carbon footprints and look at what they're doing, especially in Europe. So, I think that it has to be a global movement and even that this many other crises are going on in the world, and we've got elections coming up and there are other priorities, we have to keep our focus on climate change because our resources are scarce in this world. So, I really believe that this needs to take the forefront, that this government has had several problems and I think that needs to happen globally.
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