Nitisha Agarwal - South Asia Women in Energy (Sawie)

Nitisha currently serves as the Founder & Director of Smokeless Cookstove Foundation (SCF), a Section 8, Not for Profit which works with marginalized communities across India through teaching them the skill of making a zero-cost mud based smokeless cookstove. The technology behind this solution has been developed by its partner enterprise, Himalayan Rocket Stove (HRS). While anchoring the programmes at SCF, she doubles up as a Business Manager at HRS handling key business functions and developing opportunities to apply efficient heating and cooking solutions into the real-world problems. This helps her in integrating the clean energy solutions to a diverse set of community based users at a national level. Combined objective of both the organisations is to create efficient, high impact and low cost heating and cooking solutions at various acceptable price points including our ‘zero cost’ cookstove solution.

Since 2017, SCF has conducted field training programmes in over 11 Indian states reaching out to more than 2000 community participants. The organisation has simultaneously pivoted itself in a facilitator’s mode in order to identify gaps within the clean cooking sector both from the developers end and the participative communities’ perspective.

In line with her endeavor to the sector she’s also part of the inaugural mentorship programme – Women in Clean Cooking instituted by Global Alliance in Clean Cooking, SEforAll and GWNET for Asian and African nations.

Before stepping into the clean energy development sector, she accumulated over 17 years of years of experience in retail brand communications, public relations, business development and social media marketing with brands like Volkswagen, Skoda, Marico and Lintas.

To bring academic relevance in her work, she studied Sustainable Development and Solutions from Columbia University, Earth Institute. In addition to that, she’s successfully completed her certification programme in Education in Sustainable Development from United Nations, Earth Charter International in collaboration with Peace University, Costa Rica in 2018. Being a patron and endorser of The Earth Charter, she has continued her learning journey with the charter and completed a programme on Business and Ethical Leadership for Sustainability as a scholarship participant in 2020.

Extremely passionate about outdoor adventure, she started ‘Children of Tribe’ an outdoor learning experience and introduction to sustainable solutions for young city kids based on the ideology of Nature as a third parent. Before the pandemic, she had been conducting curated programmes over the weekends which allows children to experience nature by getting themselves fully immersed in it. This work has been featured in Condenast Traveller India’s September 2020 issue.

Avid trekker and traveller but based in Mumbai, she has her bags packed all the time and while on various assignments for her Foundation, she loves taking pictures, sharing meals on clean chulahs and writing about her experiences in form of travelogues. Her digitally published articles can be found on www.travelpurist.com.