People on the rural countryside of Vietnam are facing increasing challenges to secure energy for cooking and live. Their access to traditional cooking fuels is declining. The commercial fuels are expensive. The collection or purchasing of firewood deplete natural resources and damage the environment. The income spent on these fuels and the time spent by women and children gathering it could be used for other activities such as income generation, school and leisure. Moreover, the firewood is often burned indoors resulting in respiratory and eye problems. On the other hand, animal husbandry causes considerable sanitary and environmental pollution problems for rural households. 

How biogas works
Biogas displaces smoky cooking fires. Human waste and animal dung are collected in a reservoir. As the waste decomposes it releases methane gas which is piped into homes and burned for fuel. The remaining waste yields an organic fertilizer by-​product used by farmers. The biogas displaces carbon emissions from firewood, LPG and agricultural residues that were used before using biogas plants. Moreover, biogas plants prevent methane emissions from pig manure, which without a biogas plant is deposited in pits near the household, which rots anaerobically and emits methane.

More than CO₂ reduction
Using biogas instead of firewood and LPG means more of Vietnam’s forest is preserved which also results in less pressure on fauna and flora. Other benefits include saving on fuel purchases and less time spent by women gathering cooking fuel. The programme creates jobs in training local masons to build and maintain biogas digesters. The remains of the biodigester plant, the bioslurry is often used by the households as nutrients for their fish ponds or as organic fertilizer on their rice and corn fields, for growing coffee or fruit trees. A biogas user survey revealed that crop yields have been increased by five to 20 per cent. 

Awards and Implementation
The pro­gramme won the pres­ti­gious “En­ergy Globe Award”, “Ash­den Award” and the “Hu­man­i­tar­ian Award” of the World En­ergy Forum and is on track to meet its goal of con­struct­ing 200,000 lo­cally pro­duced house­hold di­gesters for farm­ers by 2020. The pro­gramme is im­ple­mented by the Viet­namese Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture and Rural De­vel­op­ment (MARD) to­gether with its part­ner SNV Nether­lands De­vel­op­ment Or­ga­ni­za­tion.

Car­bon Fi­nance is used to make the con­struc­tion of bio­gas plants more af­ford­able for the pas­toral­ist fam­i­lies cov­er­ing 70% of the total project costs. It is also used to pro­vide ad­di­tional fi­nan­cial sup­port to in­stall the units in clas­si­fied “poor” dis­tricts as well as for ca­pac­ity build­ing for stake­hold­ers, R&D ac­tiv­i­ties and qual­ity man­age­ment.