Background
In May 2005 the foundation Fuels from Agriculture in Communal Technology (FACT) was founded by the late professor Kees Daey Ouwens, a renowned Dutch pioneer in renewable energy.
The general objective of FACT was: “to support income generation of the rural population in developing countries by the sustainable production and use of biomass for energy purposes, with a focus on biofuels”. In the period between 2005 and 2014 the foundation has carried out several projects in developing countries. A typical example is the rural power plant in Garalo, Mali, opened in 27 November 2008, and aptly named after his initiator. The FACT foundation has generated a broad range of factual knowledge and expertise on bio-energy, but unfortunately had to close down in 2014 due to insufficient financial resources.
New Foundation
A group of people in The Netherlands, active in the bio-energy field and/or formerly involved in the activities of FACT, decided to save the intellectual heritage and knowledge generated by the FACT Foundation. The group decided to create a new foundation, formally signed on the 10th of October 2014: Bioenergy Forum FACT (BFF). One of the goals of BFF is to ensure that the knowledge that has been generated by FACT will remain available in the public domain for practitioners and researchers in the field. Therefore this website has been created, which contains a database with most of the original FACT documentation, to which relevant new bioenergy documents are added by the BFF board members. The focus remains on bioenergy applications for developing countries, in particular for rural communities.
BFF Board
The board of the BFF Foundation presently consists of six members. A short introduction of each member is given below.