Luc Estapé, Managing Director of ADES. Photo: myclimate
Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world and, at the same time, faces enormous environmental challenges. Access to education is difficult in many places, partly due to poor infrastructure. At the same time, Madagascar’s forests continue to be cleared at an alarming rate: around 90 per cent of the original forest cover has already been lost. With them, unique species of flora and fauna are disappearing – many of which are found only on this island. For example, around 94 per cent of lemur species are considered critically endangered. A key driver of deforestation is people’s daily lives: around 97 per cent of households cook using wood or charcoal. The high demand for fuel is putting the remaining forests under severe pressure.
This is where the ADES project comes in, which myclimate has been supporting for over ten years through climate protection funding contributions. By distributing efficient stoves and solar solutions, not only is wood consumption significantly reduced, but air quality in households is also improved and the health of residents enhanced. At the same time, local jobs and economic opportunities are created.
What makes this project special: It is no longer just about emissions reduction. Rather, it demonstrates how climate protection, social development and economic opportunities can work together. To mark ADES’s 25th anniversary, we spoke with Managing Director Luc Estapé about the project’s development, challenges on the ground and his vision for the future.
Luc Estapé: When Regula Ochsner, the founder of ADES, returned to Madagascar 10 years after her last visit to show her mother the beautiful forests of Madagascar, she was horrified by the massive deforestation and the loss of this unique biosphere. To minimise the main cause – high firewood consumption – she founded ADES in March 2021 and began manufacturing and distributing solar cookers. This solution was not suitable for mass adoption: too expensive, too heavy, dependent on the sun and too far removed from the cooking habits of the local population.
ADES therefore focused on efficient cooking solutions that are locally produced and scalable.
From the outset, the aim was to secure as much value as possible within the country itself through local value creation, local supply chains and local raw materials. Madagascar is not only ‘backward’ in terms of energy, but also affected by extreme poverty. Furthermore, the labour market is also very unattractive.
With the decision to focus on local value creation and scalability, this path was already set from the outset. But it could not have been foreseen that the 20-30-strong, volunteer-run NPO would evolve into a hybrid SME/NGO with 260 employees, three production sites and 13 sales outlets spanning the entire island. The original plan had assumed that a regional problem would be addressed with regional solutions – the investment required for scaling up would simply not have been possible with donation-based funding alone.
Access to climate finance through myclimate enabled ADES to make a massive investment push: thanks to this additional income, we were able to use every franc donated as an investment multiplied by a factor of 2.5.
Just under 10 years ago, the initiative originally arose from the need to cover our own wood consumption in production through sustainability in forest management. This led to ADES eventually investing not only in stove production but also in reforestation projects and environmental education programmes for teachers and pupils. However, these two activities are still funded 100 per cent by donations and specific project funding, not from the proceeds of the CO₂ reduction programmes.
It starts with the fact that children (in almost all cases girls) no longer have to spend hours searching for wood in ever-widening circles around their homes, as firewood consumption falls by 35 to 60 per cent. The cost of buying wood and charcoal can easily account for 20 to 40 per cent of household income; if half of this can be saved, every family feels the difference and has more money left over for basic needs, such as food and schooling for the children.
Thirdly, smoke emissions are drastically reduced thanks to more efficient wood burning. As most families cook indoors, particularly in bad weather, this has a huge impact on health, again primarily affecting female family members.
Is there a personal encounter or story from the project that has stayed with you in particular?
On the one hand, the shock of poverty: we’re driven through the south in an almost air-conditioned vehicle to visit the southernmost site in Ejeda. We drive through the villages at a snail’s pace – as is to be expected in such contexts, we are ‘chased’ by a crowd of children. Except that in Madagascar, they don’t ask for sweets or pens. They asked for water.
Otherwise, on a more positive note: wherever we go – whether it’s an embassy event, a networking gathering among NGOs, a visit to a potential reforestation partner, on the street, or in a restaurant – when we identify ourselves as ADES representatives, a smile lights up the other person’s face.
Very early on in my career, I had an experience that has stayed with me ever since: in Kyrgyzstan, I had a driver who was being massively exploited by ‘his’ government representative. He received barely 10 per cent of the amount I paid; the rest went into the government representative’s pocket, and the car belonged to the representative and didn’t have to be paid for. I then went with the driver to buy a car at my own expense and told him that I would pay him the salary I had been paying to the government representative, and that I would sell the car after 12 months – he would then receive 50 per cent of the sale price. In return, I would expect him to look after the car, keep it clean and always keep the tank full. After 12 months, he had saved enough to buy the car from me and from then on he was a self-employed driver with his own car.
We need to achieve the same in sustainability cooperation: how do I transfer ‘ownership’ of a project or a machine? How can we create incentives to encourage people to think ahead and plan for the future when they haven’t done so for generations?
On the one hand, there is certification for CO₂ reduction: adaptations are made almost annually, which is of course welcome, as the regulations are becoming stricter – and rightly so, if we are to maintain credibility. However, when, for example, emissions regulations are changed in traditional industry, companies are given plenty of time to make adaptations – up to 10 years. In the NPO sector, particularly here in the CO₂ market, there are changes that affect an existing vintage at very short notice. Consequently, both the certified volume and the price can change at very short notice and, in effect, with immediate effect. Specifically, we have had to accept a reduction of more than half in the volume of carbon credits within two years, without any corresponding adaptation to the price. Making business decisions under these circumstances is almost impossible; we are effectively forced to react only in the short term, and multi-year investment programmes are virtually impossible.
There needs to be an understanding that carbon reduction projects are business ventures and, as such, require a basis for planning. In an industry that is treated emotionally, where de facto religious wars are being waged, this is almost impossible. But it would still be desirable.
A crucial one. If we manage to secure funding for 10,000 stoves through traditional fundraising today, we will receive at least the same amount again over the next five years, with a two- to three-year delay. This means that we have been able to scale up much faster through climate finance than would have been possible using our own funds alone. We wouldn’t have the capacity we have today, we wouldn’t have so many staff, and our impact would be dramatically smaller.
Without climate finance, organic growth is around a third of what we can achieve in our case with climate finance.
Our sales team is struggling to scale up significantly: we need to strengthen our sales force, which we are tackling by improving the earning potential of our resellers, setting up decentralised warehouses, and redeploying our own sales staff into support roles for resellers.
CO₂ certification: massive changes are on the horizon again. Our current emissions reductions, calculated using 2023 standards, would be around 1 million tonnes per year. In reality, they are just under 600,000 this year, and from next year probably only 300,000. In addition, under the Paris Agreement calculations, only highly energy efficient cookers will be eligible for certification. We are currently assessing whether we will meet these requirements, which (again: at extremely short notice) will come into force from 1 January 2028.
Just imagine: we have invested €1 million in our production facilities over the last year and a half, and in a year and a half’s time, in the worst-case scenario, they will be worthless. Furthermore, one wonders whether it was really the regulators’ intention to completely remove cooking solutions from the market that may be slightly less efficient but nevertheless demonstrably reduce the amount of wood used for cooking by 30 to 50 per cent. What will our users do then – go back to cooking on three stones? Was the intention to increase the carbon footprint by tightening the rules?
But overall, with our National Director, Maryn Mohn-Drouet, we are now as well-positioned as we can possibly be to deal with these challenges. She comes from the private sector, but returned to Madagascar after completing her studies because she cares deeply about the country, the environment and the people here. Her professionalism, her experience, her empathy and her emotional commitment will have a profound impact on us, and I look forward to tackling these challenges together with her.
