“I do it because it’s the right thing to do and I’ve seen hundreds of thousands of women’s lives transformed. I have a purpose”

South African entrepreneur Sarah Collins invented the Wonderbag, a cookpot that is literally saving women’s lives in developing countries. She talks to Johanna Derry about what inspires her

Sarah Collins is full of energy, a firebrand if ever you met one. She’s a talker, passionate, barely pausing for breath, the conversation peppered with anecdotes of failure one moment, stories about meeting famous names – Richard Branson, Jane Goodall, Ban Ki-Moon – the next. Ten years ago she invented the Wonderbag, what she describes as “a cloth bag that looks like a pumpkin that can change the world”. It’s a simple idea – a nonelectric portable slow cooker, which prevents women and children from having to spend hours gathering fuel and living with smoke inhalation. Given that 40% of the world’s population still cooks over an open fire, four million die annually from indoor air pollution, and 90% of cleared land is never replanted, her invention is no small thing.

The seeds of the idea were sown when she was a little girl growing up in apartheid South Africa. “I had a patriarchal home, very Victorian, with old colonial ways,” she remembers. “We had nannies who’d carry us on their backs and they were the people I felt closest to. Speaking Zulu and running free on the farm, that’s when I felt happiest. As I grew older and people tried to make me conform – put me in a dress to eat at the dinner table – that didn’t suit me. From as early as I can remember, I rebelled against the system.”

She wasn’t the first in her family to have a bit of spark. During the Second World War her grandmother took in blind Italian prisoners of war. “She played a very significant role in my life. She travelled and was incredibly curious, she challenged the status quo and was always the heart and soul of any gathering, never caring what people thought of her. Perhaps the apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree!” she observes.

MAKING SENSE OF SOCIETY

The inequality of the world she grew up in stuck with her from the start. “I found it difficult to understand why I slept in nice Egyptian cotton and my nanny’s children slept round the fire.” In her teens she joined the ANC (African National Congress) party, and was arrested when she was 16 for protesting at a political forum in Pietermaritzburg. “Being an active member of the ANC was very frowned upon,” she says, “But I feel like I’ve been a freedom fighter and an activist all my life. I remember someone asking me, if I could do anything in the world, what would it be? I said I wanted to be the Secretary General of the United Nations. That’s actually my worst nightmare now, but I wanted to make an impact in a humanitarian way. I was searching for something to give me meaning and purpose. In my 20s I started to look at how I could turn my anger into something more positive.”

She realised it was often women in rural communities who were the most excluded from

economic opportunity. She thought tourism might be a way to change this and started the first woman-led safari business in Africa. This led her, a few years later, to set up another business in partnership with six communities around the Okavango Delta in Botswana, running mobile safaris and lodges.

“It’s one of Africa’s most pristine wilderness areas but all the tourism then was foreign-owned and local people weren’t benefitting from it,” she says. “I got this real bee in my bonnet about the communities there being empowered. Then I got thinking about the next generation. So I started an NGO.”

As she speaks, it’s clear that it’s her immense sense of purpose that drives her forward with such confidence. Yet she hasn’t always felt that way: “I may sound like an incredibly out-there person. I still have doubts. But I’ve learned that if I override my gut, then I make mistakes. Still, I look back and I have no regrets. I was broken – I am broken – but to build something different and go against the tide, you’ve got to have had darkness in your life. Your pain threshold has to be really high. Because this isn’t an elegant journey.”

A CRISIS OF THE GENERATIONS

Her NGO, Take Back The Future, brought children from the cities into the wilderness of southern Africa. “The problem was that these children would have extraordinary experiences of their own heritage, »