Co&Coal aims to change the standard of living of underprivileged by empower them with skills and knowledge of transforming the coconut shells to marketable product, coconut charcoal simultaneously tackle the environmental issue caused from improper disposal of coconut shell in northern part of Malaysia. We aim to expand this project from current impacted place which is Lembah Bujang to more places.

Our financial aids are from Cooperative and Entrepreneurial Development Institute (CEDI) of UUM and Shell Malaysia. With these financial aids, we manage to expand the project by reaching to low income villagers in Lembah Bujang.

Project Details

This project is collaborating with Riverside Travel and Tours to deliver and instill the knowledge of transforming the coconut shell into coconut charcoal. In last term, we also get help from V.I.P, Volunteering for International Professional conducted the need assessment of the villagers at Lembah Bujang and we found Mak Su is potential enough to join our project. Our current target audience Mak Su, is a housewife with 6 children are living in a poor condition. Mak Su join our project since nine months ago and she really showed her enthusiastic and desire in producing coconut charcoal to earn more side income to change the standard if living. Unfortunately, with our current method we use to produce charcoal not productive enough due to some problems:

1^st- Milling machine, milling machine is used for crush the fully carbonize coconut charcoal to fine coal dust. We did invest a new machine and the new machine able to crush the carbonize coconut shell into fine coal dust but the main problem is the capacity if this machine too small and it’s caused to lower down the productivity.

2^nd- Shaping mold, with our current shaping method is too energy consume and labor intensive because we shape the charcoal manually with own hand. 

3^rd- Due to from October to February is raining season, so during the raining day our target audience, Mak Su unable to burn and dry the charcoal because the main materials for burning will get wet and the final products are dry under sunlight.

Our Co&coal products are selling in the market for RM12 for 3kg. Our target audience Mak Su place the products in grocery shop and receive good responds and feedback from the customers. However due to the problems above effected the demand exceed the supply. Since Mak Su already start selling the charcoal in the market so she earned the profit around RM500. In order to expand our project to impact more people in need, we plan to conduct more workshops in the village to attract more people to join Co&Coal project and we targeting 5 more villagers join us to work together with our current target audience in a cooperate manners. 

Through Co&Coal project, our current target audience Mak Su is able to gain happiness by becoming an entrepreneur and successful increased her monthly income. Moreover, our target audience not only know how to produce charcoal and sell it, now she also equipped with marketing skills, basic accounting and expanded her networking. Besides that, our project not only impact on our target audience, it’s also impacted on environment. Lembah Bujang is a place with extinction mangrove species and also the mangrove’s reservation area by UNESCO. The use of mangrove is transformed into charcoal, once replaced mangrove charcoal with our coconut charcoal will reduce to chop down the mangrove trees in the same time help to reserve the ecosystem.

In this project, I understand that helping the community are not only helping them financially, but we are also witnessing them the transformation of a dependent individual into independent entrepreneur and I believe we should not neglect the underpriviledge because everyone deserve a better future. Last but not least, I would like to say thank you to  Khind Starfish Foundation for funding our project and we managed to expand the project to more people in need and exaggerate in our efforts of transforming the trash to cash.