Cleaner Fuel, Smarter Seeds: How Naswirah’s Innovation Is Helping Families Thrive

by IFRC Solferino Academy | Dec 12, 2025 | Innovation Stories, Limitless Stories

A team member interviews women in the community to understand their daily challenges first-hand. Nalukwago Naswirah’s work didn’t start with technology, but with listening to the lived experiences of families facing rising fuel costs and economic uncertainty.

Listening First: Where Innovation Began

In many rural households across western Uganda, the choice of how to cook a meal and what to plant in the soil determines far more than daily routines: it shapes health, income, and resilience. Rising fuel costs, persistent indoor air pollution, and increasingly unpredictable growing seasons place sustained pressure on families already navigating economic uncertainty. These intersecting challenges form the everyday reality that Nalukwago Naswirah set out to change—by starting not with technology or funding, but with the lived experiences of the women and families most affected.

For Naswirah, clean energy and climate-resilient agriculture were never separate issues. They were interconnected forces shaping health, food security, and everyday dignity. “We didn’t start big,” she says. “We started by listening.” The IFRC Solferino Academy created the space for that listening to grow into practical action through its youth innovation journey, Limitless.

Community members map out business activities and income goals during a training session. Through the ‘Limitless’ mentorship, the team learned to turn ideas into structured plans, focusing on business modelling and expected outcomes to ensure their solutions last.

From Ideas to Enterprise

Through Limitless, Naswirah and her team accessed mentoring, small grants, and flexible learning that allowed them to test solutions grounded in daily life. These early experiments evolved into her social enterprise, Bassattu Innovations, born directly out of IFRC mentorship.

The enterprise now centres on two complementary strands of work. Through Fuel Her with Waste, Naswirah and her team develop cleaner household fuel options that reduce harmful smoke and lower family expenses, with support from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. Through Herharvest, they strengthen seed sovereignty by helping households select climate-resilient local varieties, understand GMOs, and protect traditional agricultural knowledge.

“Limitless didn’t hand us answers; it helped us ask better questions,” Naswirah reflects. Through short learning loops—try, learn, adjust—prototypes moved from workshop tables into kitchens and courtyards, supported by branches and volunteers of the Uganda Red Cross Society. “Innovation is not an app; it is a habit,” she adds.

Naswirah showcases the eco-friendly charcoal briquettes produced by her team. These cleaner fuel options are designed to reduce harmful indoor smoke and help rural families stretch their household budgets further.

Strengthening Skills, Strengthening Impact

Alongside this hands-on work, Naswirah pursued a Master’s in Project Planning and Management at Bishop Stuart University, applying academic insight to strengthen planning, monitoring, and resource-mobilization strategies.

As the work expanded, the IFRC Solferino Academy continued to accompany Bassattu Innovations supporting its outreach, strengthening community trust, and addressing misinformation. For Herharvest, this meant delivering clear, reliable seed information in local languages and low-bandwidth formats, enabling households to navigate conflicting advice and persistent rumours with confidence. Naswirah credits the programme’s emphasis on clarity and mentoring for sharpening her enterprise’s message and extending its reach.

Naswirah and her colleagues present their progress to board members and stakeholders in Mbarara City. Support from National Society structures has been vital for scaling their work and addressing misinformation about seeds and climate resilience.

Recognition and Scaling Through Partnerships

Recognition followed—not as a finish line, but as confirmation that community-led solutions were taking root. Uganda Red Cross platforms highlighted Bassattu Innovations’ cleaner-fuel prototypes and seed-sovereignty work as part of climate-smart livelihood efforts.

New partnerships soon translated into scaled action. Through the Regenerative Settlement Project, funded by YICE Uganda, Reliance, and Arup, households and toilets are now being constructed in the Rubondo community, expanding access to safer living conditions and reinforcing the link between energy, health, and dignified shelter.

A session with young volunteers creates a space for peer learning and mentorship. As Naswirah notes, youth don’t need perfect conditions to succeed; they need peers, mentors, and a safe place to test their ideas.

Extending Clean Energy to Displaced Communities

Building on the momentum of her clean-energy work, Naswirah is now extending her focus to displaced communities through the She Saves Project, a clean-energy initiative introducing affordable solar cooking solutions for refugee households in Nakivale, where reliance on firewood remains high and energy poverty is acute. Drawing directly on the lessons of Fuel Her with Waste, the project adapts community-based energy solutions to humanitarian settings. Naswirah is currently leading the project’s resource-mobilization strategy and conducting research on household energy scarcity to strengthen the evidence base for sustainable scale-up.

Nalukwago Naswirah, founder of Bassattu Innovations, wears her Red Cross vest as she advocates for community-led change. For Naswirah, innovation is not just about apps or funding—it is a habit of asking better questions to solve everyday problems.

Accompaniment That Lasts

“With Solferino mentors, we turned lessons into language: business modelling, partner readiness, and storytelling that doesn’t oversell,” she says. This shift carried the work from short-term projects toward enterprise readiness, supported by National Society structures that keep community knowledge at the centre.

Today, the impact is visible in everyday ways: smoke that clears more quickly from kitchens, fuel budgets that stretch further, crops that withstand erratic seasons, and households that trust their own knowledge again. “Youth don’t need perfect conditions,” Naswirah adds. “We need peers, mentors, and a safe place to learn. Limitless gave us that.”

In the end, what endures is not awards or recognition, but the routines families now own: cleaner cooking, smarter seed choices, and the confidence that comes from deciding together. For Naswirah, this is the promise kept; accompaniment that lasts long enough for ideas to take root where they matter most.