Speakers

Katrin Pütz is a German agricultural engineer and social entrepreneur, known as the inventor of the biogas backpack and founder of the international biogas company (B)energy. She is the one in the clean cooking sector openly calling out the empty promises of development aid and the hypocrisy of carbon offset projects in Africa.

In 2014, she founded (B)energy - a German-based but Africa-rooted company that rejects donor dependency and operates through local distributors. Her fully self-sustaining business model turns biogas users into entrepreneurs, not aid recipients. With patented technologies like the iconic biogas backpack, a modular biogas burner, and the biogas mitad for Ethiopia, she makes biogas systems practical, and a source of income.

In 2021, she co-founded BiogasUnite, a Pan-African initiative built to fix what others won’t even admit: broken biogas systems and distorted markets flooded by carbon credit schemes that put the burden of climate protection on African households. Drawing on her unique experience as a purely entrepreneurial international actor in the sector, she unites African biogas professionals to lead the creation of a continent-wide service infrastructure that connects users, technicians, governments, and investors - turning biogas producers into paid climate contractors.

With BiogasUnite, Katrin challenges the widespread belief that the clean cooking transition must rely on charity. She advocates for recognizing the real, measurable social and climate value of switching from firewood and charcoal to clean cooking - and for ensuring that this value reaches the people actually making the change. Not technology providers or carbon certifiers, but African households deserve the rewards. She opens up a bold invitation to the fossil fuel industry: to invest in a credible, scalable, and socially just alternative - one that delivers measurable impact and builds a real climate legacy in the clean cooking sector.

A trained cabinet maker, environmental scientist, and agricultural engineer, Katrin blends technical precision, scientific insight, and hard-earned field experience. At a time when household biogas was virtually unknown in Europe, she introduced it not as a solution for Africa, but as a lesson from Africa - turning the tables and showing that Europe, too, can learn from African experience.