- In Machakos County, Mary Munyao is transforming agricultural waste into eco-friendly fuel and creating jobs for women in the process
Mary Munyao remembers her mother’s kitchen as a battlefield. Each meal meant thick smoke, burning eyes, and endless coughing. It was a daily ritual repeated in millions of Kenyan homes, where women bear the brunt of cooking with traditional charcoal and firewood.
Today, Munyao is fighting back. As co-founder and CEO of Orya Briqs, she’s converting macadamia shells and other agricultural waste into eco-friendly briquettes that burn longer, produce less smoke, and cost 30% less than conventional cooking fuel.
Two months into full implementation, her clean energy initiative in Machakos County is proving that sustainable solutions can emerge from personal experience.
“I witnessed how my mother was struggling,” Munyao says. “Her kitchen had become this place of suffering, and I knew something had to change.”
But awareness was scarce. Online research and visits to other sustainable energy producers revealed a glaring gap: few people were tackling the problem, and even fewer were succeeding at scale. Munyao saw an opportunity not just to reduce carbon emissions, but to address unemployment and gender inequality simultaneously.
Her breakthrough came through the HAESI programme run by the Alliance for Women and Girls (AFWAG), which provided the mindset shift she needed.
“It’s rare to get a programme that talks about your wellbeing as an entrepreneur,” she reflects. The personal mastery training proved crucial when doubt crept in during early implementation.
“I was very, very scared. I’d never been at the frontline of a company,” Munyao admits. “But I went back to my notes from the sessions and realised: no one is coming to save you. You have to do what feels right.”
The ideation stage was challenging. Without financial backing or partners for bootstrapping, Munyao leveraged her network. A donor from the UAE, Natasha, whom she’d met through a previous project, believed in the vision—providing seed funding, mentorship, and even her marketing team. The support yielded logos, business cards, brochures, a professional pitch deck, and an upcoming website.
Still, obstacles remain. Munyao needs mixers and carbonisers to automate production and maintain quality. Agricultural waste is seasonal, forcing the team to supplement with charcoal dust for year-round production. Market access has been difficult, though partnerships with organisations like the Green Digital Innovation Hub and pending membership in the United Briquette Producers Association of Kenya are opening doors.
The product development itself was deliberately community-focused. “We give potential customers a chance to be co-creators,” Munyao explains. “They help us create a product that really matters to them.” Surrounding households have received samples, providing feedback that’s refined the formulation through multiple trials.
Her interaction with AFWAG reinforced a crucial insight: in male-dominated sectors like energy, women, the primary users of cooking fuel, are often excluded from solutions. Munyao is changing that equation. She’s created jobs for eight women so far, with 12 employees total, most of them women and and youth.
“When you empower a woman, you empower the whole community,” she says. “I’ve seen change not only in their lives but in the lives of people around them.”
The dedication of her female workforce hasn’t gone unnoticed. “They’re not only helping us to be profitable,” Munyao observes. “They’re looking forward to improving their own livelihoods.”
Success, for Munyao, means scaling across Kenyan counties and into East Africa, contributing to the fight against climate change while making sustainability just and inclusive. From a smoke-filled childhood kitchen to a clean energy enterprise, she’s proving that women aren’t just end users of sustainable solutions; they’re the agents of change creating them.
