A cookstove that turns crop waste into fuel and electricity

At the end of every harvest in rural Malawi, where Innocent Mandili grew up, piles of maize cobs, rice husks, and groundnut shells were burned or thrown away. Families, meanwhile, walked long distances to collect firewood and cooked in smoke-filled kitchens.

"I could never understand why one resource was becoming scarce while another was being wasted," he says. "That question stayed with me and eventually became the Thermo EL Stove."

“Innovation is not about creating what has never existed; it is about creating what makes life better, solves real problems, and changes what people believe is possible.”

Innocent Mandili

The stove transforms agricultural waste into carbon neutral briquettes for clean cooking, and it generates electricity through thermoelectric technology. Instead of letting heat escape, it converts part of it into up to 10 watts, "enough to charge a phone or power LED lights during cooking." The remaining ash is converted into biochar and organic pesticide.

Innocent gives the numbers behind the need. More than 15 million Malawians still rely on firewood and charcoal for cooking. More than 250,000 hectares of forest are lost every year, and over 100,000 people suffer annually from illnesses linked to household air pollution.

"For me, this is deeply personal because I have lived the problem I am trying to solve," he says.

Over the past few years Innocent has designed and refined multiple prototypes, and piloted the stove in partnership with a university. It was slow work. "Developing hardware in a resource constrained environment meant learning by doing, rebuilding prototypes countless times, and refusing to give up when resources were limited," he says. "Every setback became another lesson."

Today the Thermo EL Stove is the subject of a patent application filed in Malawi. He says the initiative has processed over 5,000 tonnes of agricultural waste, trained more than 2,000 rural primary and secondary school students in STEM, clean energy, and innovation, and created five direct green jobs.

The team is now developing a Pay As You Go model using mobile money, so that low income households can get the stove through affordable monthly payments instead of a large upfront cost.

He is the founder and chief executive of MI Technologies and Innovations, a startup focused on renewable energy technologies, and the stove sits inside it.

"My dream is not only to manufacture clean cookstoves, but to prove that innovations developed in rural Africa can shape the future of clean energy," Innocent says.