Where it all began...

In most rural households in developing countries an open fire in the living room is used for cooking. This is dangerous especially for small children who can fall into the fire and suffer severe injuries. Living in the smokey environment causes respiratory problems for everyone in the long term. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that more than three million people a year die prematurely from illness attributable to the household air pollution caused by open fires for cooking: WHO fact sheet "Household air pollution and health"

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Our Mission...

Our aim is to install safe cooking stoves with chimneys to remove smoke in as many rural homes as possible. The need is great. With your help we want to secure a safe, healthy life for these families.

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4 minute video: Stove construction in Nepal

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The special thing about our stoves: The chimney

The impetus to start building ovens came from the health sector. Therefore, the removal of the smoke gases is just as important to us as the energy saving. Nearly all of the stoves that we have built therefore have a chimney, which distinguishes our clay stoves from most of the models that are common in developing countries. If you want to learn more about the health aspects and the function of the fireplace, you can read here.

We took a chart from "Accelerating clean cooking as a nature-based climate solution" by Clean Cooking Alliance showing the , die the effects of different types of cooking on climate and health and placed our mud stoves there. It shows now the equally big effect on health and benefit for the climate.

The result: safe, healthy energy saving cooking stoves

Advantages of our cooking stoves

• Remove the risk of accidents due to open fires.
• Avoid health risks similar to those suffered by heavy smokers like damage to the lungs and arteries and even lung cancer.
• Avoid consequences of smoke in living areas, e.g. inflamation of the eyes and respitory paths.
• Our stoves need about 50% less wood than open fires. This reduces CO₂-emissions, the environmental pressure on wood reserves and the work required for collecting wood.
• By training local people to be stove manufacturers we generate employment in the target countries.
  

With certainty: your donation results in  stoves!

How do we ensure that your donations are effective?

For every stove which a stovemaker bills a receipt with signature from the recipient must be provided. Most stovemakers have simple digital cameras or smartphones. In each household where they install an stove they provide a photo on which the stove, the owner and the serial number of the stove must be visible.

The serial number consists of two initials of the stovemaker and a number. That allows us to map stoves to stovemakers. All the stoves are registered in a database.

The serial numbers also help our field workers when the visit villages and interview the stove owners. The teams in the field usually consist of an experienced native Field Worker and a foreign volunteer. You can find a report from a volunteer here.

We aim to check 5 - 10% of the stoves as part of this socalled Monitoring program. The stoves are selected randomly. We receive information about the quality the state and the service-life of the stove as well as checking whether the stoves are used and maintained correctly. Furthermore the owners are asked about their satisfaction and have a chance to provide praise, criticism and suggestions for improvement.