Jatonet is focused on reducing poverty through improving livelihoods, distribution of Envirofit Clean Cook stoves, Biolite cook stoves and maximizing positive change within communities surrounding project sites. Our social impact is grounded in the following things: job creation, capacity building, selling of bamboo products, reneweable energy and trainings. We shall give the community opportunities and skills, to help them help themselves to a better future. Once the community has that, improvements to health, education, infrastructure, the environment and women’s empowerment will all shortly follow suit.

Our social impact expands outside Bungoma County. Local community entrepreneurs shall establish small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to supply goods and services to our operations. We shall employ Staff and received trainings in bamboo handicrafts aimed at stimulating bamboo related SMEs.

Through Jatonet subsidiary, each project moves away from a traditional model of philanthropy to support the development of SMEs, micro-finance and local entrepreneurship, empowering individuals and communities to help themselves.

This economic development will continue to trickle through society. Higher incomes secure the purchasing capacity of the poor. Their spending stimulates local businesses spreading social impact even further.

When we focus on job creation and capacity building & trainings, the benefits are endless, and the result is sustained, natural resource friendly economic development of rural areas.

Using the Climate, Community and Biodiversity Standards, Jatonet monitors and quantifies its social impact.

STRATEGY: The demand for food, clean water, health and employment is a challenge to many communities. In many cases, social and economic development is given priority over conservation, leading to unsustainable use of eco-systems which perpetuates the downward spiral of environmental degradation and hardship. Our immediate task begins with identifying and contacting local communities that shall strive to meet their livelihood needs in environmentally friendly ways. The community will be assisted to identify, understand and the community will need to be well informed and aware about the successfully tackle their key problems and opportunities. To this end, many environmental, social, cultural, economic and political dimensions that affect their lives and the many ways in which their actions affect their local environment. The first step will be to develop participatory insights into what a community knows and does, including its patrimony of local, traditional and indigenous knowledge and expertise in the management of natural resource, what challenges it faces and what opportunities are available to it. This understanding shall be oriented towards community empowerment. The second step of the approach shall be based on the capacities of local communities to organise themselves on basis of understanding they manage to gain. In other words, the community that wish to respond to the problems and opportunities they have identified, will be encouraged to structure themselves in equitable ways and to plan for action, asking for help they need and as much as possible, joining forces with social actors. Our organisation will facilitate on Case-by-case basis, establishment of effective partnerships, enabling the community to act-learning practical and policy lessons together in every step of the way.