WONDERBAGS FOR AFRICA AND THE WORLD

A simple South African invention, originally invented to help the poor, is heading into fancy kitchens in the UK. The Wonderbag, stuffed with recycled polystyrene beads, is a non-electric slow cooker. A pot of hot ingredients placed into its folds will keep stewing slowly for hours. It was invented by Sarah Collins (42), a South African eco-entrepreneur with a social development background. In 2008, during a power cut in Durban, she kept her dinner cooking by surrounding the pot with cushions. She developed the idea further with poverty activist Moshy Mathe. Following a promotion which saw a Wonderbag given away free with the purchase of three boxes of its curry powder, Unilever recently ordered five million Wonderbags. Microsoft and JP Morgan are supporting the goal of getting 100 million Wonderbags into homes by 2015. It is sold with a recipe book and is perfect for slow-cooked stews, curries, soups, casseroles, potroasts and even oats porridge. Although the Wonderbag was designed to help the poor, it's just as useful for those who work fulltime and don't have time to cook a full meal when they get home. Wonderbag is one of Africa’s first projects to be registered with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as a Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) project - meaning that for every Wonderbag sold, verified carbon offsets will be traded on the international market. Simpler versions of this concept have been around in South Africa since the 1970s but none made it to the fancy UK kitchens.