A SMOKELESS COOKSTOVE REVOLUTION FOR INDIAN FAMILIES

A Smokeless Cookstove Revolution for Indian Families. Cookfire Smoke Kills... mostly women and children

According to World Health Organization estimates, and more than 800 million people are impacted by exposure to HAP (Household Air Pollution).

Due to their long exposures every day at the home's hearth, women and young children are particularly at risk!

The Scale of the Problem

• Around 3 billion people cook and heat their homes using open fires and simple stoves burning biomass (wood, animal dung and crop waste) and coal.
• Over 4 million people die prematurely each year from illness attributable to the household air pollution from cooking with solid fuels.
• More than 50% of premature deaths due to pneumonia among children under 5 are caused by the particulate matter (soot) inhaled from household air pollution.
• 3.8 million premature deaths annually from noncommunicable diseases including stroke, ischaemic heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and lung cancer are attributed to exposure to household air pollution.

What can be done about it?

There are quite a few alternative smokeless cookstove options and programs attempting to share their solutions with varying degrees of success. Many of these stoves are manufactured products that cost significant amounts to produce, distribute, train to use, maintain and service. As a result, many fail or have limited ability to scale up to any significant degree.

Our idea is so simple, it can scale indefinitely!

We have developed a smokeless cookstove that can be made by anyone with readily found locally available materials (dirt, clay, straw, water and any puffed grain).

The trick is in the design and the addition of a puffed grain to the clay, such as puffed rice. In simple terms we are teaching people to make insulated burn tubes that are highly efficient as they get hot enough to burn smoke, resulting in a clean burn and requiring far less fuel.

With this information we have already started training workshop leaders to take these skills to rural villages all over India. There they run workshops to teach villagers and local NGO's in the art and craft of making smokeless cooking fires.

They are too simple and too effective to not be used.

Not only are they relatively smokeless (at least 90% less than usual), they are also highly efficient using about 25 - 33% of the fuel of a conventional cookstove.

The other advantage of people making their own stoves is they can be tailored to suit each family's particular situation and cultural context. One of the reasons many stove projects fail is that they try to implement a 'one size fits all' approach.

These stoves can be re-designed, re-shaped, adjusted, modified and adapted to suit countless situations. This is easily the simplest and most cost effective way to spread the smokeless cookstove concept to the largest amount of people.

What happens to the money?

We are already operational and are now in the process of setting up our Not For Profit legal structure so we can take grants from Foundations who are ready to fund us. In order to do this, we need to cover the transition period and some legal costs.

All the funds raised here go towards employing our coordinator and the trainers over this transition period and the legal costs for setting up the proper structure to operate legally in India. The directors will be all Indian to ensure this project is fully funded and operated domestically.

We aim to start a smokeless cookstove revolution by giving everyone the skills to make their own.