Alex Rose-Innes
When young Ghanaian entrepreneur, Amin Zulley Abubaker started Zaacoal, all he wanted to do was find a way to ease his country, Ghana’s, waste problem. Never did he think that his enterprise would literally set the world on fire, but in a green and ecological friendly way.
With Africans of all colour finding any excuse for a barbeque, (called a braai in many countries), more than 30 million tons of harmful charcoal are used per annum to start these. And with many households on the continent reliant on wood and charcoal for cooking and warm water, it leads to a huge amount of waste across the continent. In the Greater Accra area in Ghana alone, municipal workers are only able to collect 500 tonnes of waste daily with the rest ending up in landfills.
Many farmers in Ghana subsist on coconut sales and products and the husks which are not used become waste. It got this young man, who had already in 2016 been recognised as one of the top entrepreneurs in Africa, thinking about the possible uses of this organic waste.
With an increasing climate conscious world, Zaacoal (https://zaacoal.com/) today produces enough eco-friendly charcoal for 25 million customers, while providing cheap, green energy as primary cooking fuel to rural areas in his own country where constant energy supply is a major problem. In a mere three years, Sulley had hit upon a brilliant idea and solved Accra’s biggest waste issue, enabling a major environmental and social impact.
Instead of using traditional wood, which leads to deforestation or kerosene, responsible for severe environmental and health issues, 1 000 Ghanian coconut sellers provide Sulley with enough organic waste to be used not only for braais, but also for traditional shisha pipes and medical use.
Zaacoal derives from the hausa word Zaafi, meaning hot and coal and became the name for one of the most successful products ever to be produced by such a young entrepreneur on the African continent. With his vision for a cleaner country, Sulley’s product saved Ghana’s forests where more than 90% of trees are used as firewood.
The use of this eco-friendly product is paving the way towards a cleaner and healthier society where in Sulley’s hometown of Accra, 2 000 tonnes of solid waste is disposed of daily. These end up on beaches and in gutters and lead to regular flash floods and a variety of diseases.
It had been scientifically proved that smoke from firewood (such as regular charcoal) and kerosene carry extreme health risks killing millions of people. Coconut husks produce almost no smoke and had played a large role in reducing the 13 000 smoke-related deaths in in Ghana. It is estimated that as many as 4 million people die as a result of dangerous fire practices across the globe on an annual basis. With more than 75% of Ghanaians relying on either charcoal or wood as a primary energy source, Sulley’s Zaacoal is saving lives as well.
Zaacoal is sold by women in their communities to obtain a sustainable income and with the product being so cheap, even the poorest are able to afford it.
Sulley had to use his school fees to see his dream take off and for years had to personally convince traditional users of wood charcoal to switch to his product.
What does the future hold for Suley, his team and Zaacoal? “Our plan is to scale very fast to cover most parts of the continent and the global market. We have come to realise what happens in Ghana resonates across the whole continent,” he says.
BLURB:
“I realised that what happens in Ghana resonates across the whole continent” – Amin Sulley
