Background

Tofu and tempe are fundamental to the Indonesian diet. Demand for these products is served by an industry of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) employing 285000 workers in 85000 businesses. Production practices are extremely energy inefficient and environmentally damaging. Enterprises use firewood resulting in a per-factory emissions average of 450 tons CO2/year and sector-wide emissions of 30 million tons. Using its links to producer associations key Ministries and the National Standards Agency Mercy Corps has built a successful programme which has supported 1000 producers to switch from firewood to LPG since 2009. The project developed a lease-to-own financing scheme where the equipment also serves as a guarantee enabling small producers to purchase clean technologies. In January 2012 the programme expanded with EU funding. The initiative also installed two pilot biogas digesters which use liquid waste from tofu and tempe production to create biogas. This can substitute for about 10% of LPG usage.

Purpose

To scale up the proven EE pilot switchover projects to a further 100 micro small and medium enterprises in the soybean processing sector to demonstrate the long-term benefits to expand the use of biogas and to better link SMEs with financing

Implementor

Mercy Corps