Traditional cooking methods using wood in rudimentary 3 stone-open fire cookstoves are inefficient, unhealthy, and degrading the forests. The manufacturing of improved cookstoves aims to empower women in rural areas through several trainings to manufacture, repair and maintain their own improved cookstoves, mostly built from locally available materials.
This project aims at building and distributing 500,000 improved cookstoves in Malawi. The cookstoves will be locally made by women, with local materials including technology transfer from Kenya, thereby enabling the emergence of a valuable economic chain, stimulating job creation and revenue flows at a regional level. Cooking and wood collecting time reduction will contribute to empower women by freeing them time. Meanwhile, they will be incentivized to build improved cookstoves for other women and hence become entrepreneurs. Besides, the transition to a less wood-consuming cooking method will have a measurable impact on both the health of the households and the pressure on close forest ecosystems.
