Introducing alternative fuel sources

“Life is like a book and the person who doesn’t travel gets to read only one page of it” is a saying that has been true for 30-year-old Shirley Koriana. She loves travelling. It was these travels to different parts of Kenya and East Africa that opened her eyes to the different types of fuels that families use for cooking. The lack of creativity out there spurred her into starting a business.

“I noticed that in some rural areas where charcoal was scarce, families were using plastics and shoe soles to cook. I couldn’t help but think about the health dangers that these families were putting themselves in,” she says.

When she started researching alternative sources of heat, she came across fuel briquettes.

“I hadn’t heard much about them at the time. Luckily for me, the job I was holding then gave me all the resources I needed for the research,” she says.

The environmental science degree holder worked as a conservation education officer with a wildlife foundation at the time. Her job involved teaching conservation matters to groups of people from across the country. She used the opportunity to introduce briquette making into her training. In the meantime, she learnt all she could about briquettes and even invented a small manual machine to make them.

After six years in employment and about a year into her research in briquette making, in January 2014, she walked out of her job to try her hand at business. “What pushed me out of employment was the need to do my own thing. I wanted to work for myself, to build a business for myself,” she says.

Starting out however proved much harder than she had imagined it would be. She had forgotten one very important step for going into business; she hadn’t set aside any money to start. All she had was just enough to register a business.

BIG BREAK

“All I needed to start production was charcoal dust, waste paper and a binding ingredient. So I began befriending charcoal vendors. They would give me the dust for free before they realised what I was using it for and began charging a little money for it,” she recalls.

Other than finances, her other challenge was changing the attitude of the market, specifically convincing people to stop using charcoal, which they had used for years, and start using her briquettes.

“It was a hard idea to sell. Even the name of the product was hard. So I had to find a way to convince them that my product was not only cheaper, it was better,” she says.

Producing a high quality product that could rival charcoal was hard. All the experience she had in briquette making had been in training. Now faced with the task of making her own briquettes to sell, it was an uphill task. She kept trying and failing to meet the standard she was aiming for. The first few sacks she sold would either be returned or the buyers would end up not using them. It took Shirley nine long months to finally nail the recipe for smokeless briquettes.

“My big break came in September 2014 when a school contracted me to produce a large quantity of briquettes for them,” she says. One and a half years in, her team has grown to five. Three people are involved in the production, one in transportation and another in advertising.

The most valuable lesson that she has learnt on her journey to entrepreneurship has to be the value of presentation. In the beginning, she imagined that since she was selling some sort of fuel, then having a good quality would be enough. It wasn’t.

It wasn’t until she sourced for presentable bags and branded them that people began taking her product as seriously as she. Her husband Patrick is a graphic designer and he came up with very creative ideas for the designs.

She now sells a 20-kg bag of briquettes for Sh900. When she isn’t working on production, Shirley has taken to teaching women in her community the process. She has also come up with a manual so that once the training is done, they can take the knowledge away with them.

“I want to build an industry. To give more people jobs,” she says of her dream.

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Shirley’s words of wisdom

• She was innovative from the get go seeing as she designed the machine that she uses.

• Persistence was what got her to finally make the ideal smokeless product.
• Her greatest words of wisdom are, “Let what you do speak for you.”