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 optimise the use of their stove and lower the consumption of woody biomass.
The stoves have been designed specifically for the project to be adapted to the local customs and will be manufactured in both Malawi and Kenya.
This project aims at building and distributing 300,000 improved cookstoves in Malawi. The cookstoves will be made in Kenya and Malawi, 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 built 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.
