This post originally appeared on the Wokai blog on January 27, 2009.

What does it mean to be green?  How do energy sources relate to poverty alleviation in developing countries?  Who should be making decisions about rural energy use?

I’ve been thinking more about these questions lately.  We recently posted some new borrowers on Wokai, whose businesses focus on selling cow dung to burn as fuel.  Here’s one such profile:

Several things stand out to me in Aodunsiqige’s profile: her daughter’s poetic name and musical ambitions, her family’s transition from selling millet to lending equipment to selling cow dung, her awareness of options and prices for winter heating materials…

Curious about the environmental impact of Aodunsiqige’s business, I asked my friend Jimmy Tran, who is a pHd student in Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources, writing his dissertation on air quality in China.  Jimmy shared the following chart:

Source: World Health Organization. Download WHO_FuelForLife_2006

In other words, the energy content of dung is low, so you need to burn a lot to produce heat.  Combustion is inefficient, and releases many toxic products, which are harmful to both climate and health.  Much of the burning happens indoors, which exposes people directly to the smoke.

The use of dung for heating is most common in high elevation regions, where wood and agricultural products are scarce, meaning few alternatives exist.  However, the dung is produced locally, which suggests that less energy is expended in transporting it to its destination.

Thanks Jimmy for sharing your expertise!

George, who recently returned from Inner Mongolia, says that dung is used for both cooking and heating homes.  He visited a family that had an empty brick compartment in their house, that heated the room and the food cooking on the stove, and had the resulting smoke channel away through the chimney.  They can also burn coal in the same compartment.  Here’s a quick video he made showing what this looks like:

This reminds me of a blog post that Courtney wrote last year, about her conversation with Tracey Turner from MicroPlace regarding including a “green filter” on Wokai.org to differentiate borrowers using environmentally-friendly technologies.  She wrote:

Are green borrowers necessarily “better” or more “worthy” of a microfinance loan than non-green borrowers? Is it right to create a “green” tier system? Shouldn’t the loan distribution be based more on need rather than a “green” factor? Why should Wokai empower users to impose their standards on the working poor? Shouldn’t it be based more on a redistribution of wealth than a redistribution of standards?

Yes and no. Some green technologies are beneficial in the eyes of both the user and borrower. For example, some of the microentrepreneurs we visited in Ningxia Province were using solar panels to decrease costs. Why pay for electricity when they can rely on solar energy for free? (Solar panels were donated to the village by a Chinese solar company.) Another borrower we spoke with used biogas to heat her stove. Her entire house was completely sustainable. In both these situations, using clean technologies and microfinance ultimately allowed borrowers to drive down costs. Such a situation allows both borrowers and users to gain from the combination of green and microfinance. …

Microfinance is about helping those in need and green efforts should be secondary to that. It is our intention to allow users to search by those most in need as well as those that use green business practices. In order to make it all work together, I think it is important to educate users about the green factor, why some borrowers can be green and other can’t. It will also be important to monitor non-green borrowers to make sure they are not being left behind because of the “green” filter. We intend to do so.

Overall, I think that Aodunsiqige’s business is a pragmatic way to apply the resources available in her community to meet a critical seasonal need.  I am proud to support borrowers like her in their entrepreneurial endeavors.  At the same time, there is much room for energy innovation in China.  What if there were a more environmentally friendly solution that was both cheaper than local alternatives and presented easily-noticed benefits like improved smell and heat capacity?  I’ve read about D.light Design, which makes solar-powered lights for India, and Suntech Power, China’s largest solar company, and I attended the latest event hosted by BEER (Beijing Energy and Environment Roundtable) and I am enthusiastic about the great work that people are doing to address these issues!